Microsoft Move to be the End of JPEG?

jcatcw writes "Microsoft Corp. will submit a new photo format to an international standards organization. The format, HD Photo (formerly known as Windows Media Photo), can accommodate lossless and lossy compression. Microsoft claims that adjustments can be made to color balance and exposure settings that won't discard or truncate data that occurs with other bit-map formats."

Comments

Nup, No, Nada.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Not going to end jpg - everyone dissatisfied with JPG is already using RAW. Everyone satisified with jpg will stick with jpg.

This is going to enjoy the same sort of limited uptake as jpeg2000 vs jpg, mp4/wma/ogg vs mp3, png vs gif, etc.

Few other things to note:

1) The 'HD' doesn't stand for High Definition, it's just there to get the association with HD TV in consumers minds. *rolls eyes*

2) This technology is patented to the hilt & the licensing terms for the HD Photo Device Porting Kit 1.0 licensing terms specifically exclude copyleft (GPL style) licenses.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[drgonzo59]

Which raw are you talking about? Is it DNG, PEF or a hundred other proprietary raw formats?

limited uptake as jpeg2000 vs jpg, mp4/wma/ogg vs mp3, png vs gif, etc As opposed to a rapid updake of Pentax's PEF raw format. How many browsers do you know that render that format?

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Which raw are you talking about? Is it DNG, PEF or a hundred other proprietary raw formats?

Doesn't matter, the point is that anyone who's dissatisifed with JPG has allready found an alternative.

How many browsers do you know that render that format?

If you'd bothered to read the article before commenting, you would know that support in the camera is the support that matters.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[dedazo]

everyone dissatisfied with JPG is already using RAW

Actually, in the context of digital photography (which I assume is what you're talking about here, though JPEG is of course not limited to that) "everyone" uses TIFF. Just try to do freelance for a news agency and watch how quickly they ask you for TIFF files, which only the high-end cameras can generate.

I suppose some of the smaller shops or newspapers and whatnot do use RAW, but for Reuters et.al if it's not TIFF you're not getting a paycheck. The same goes for the big stock photography companies and so on.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[gallondr00nk]

mp4/wma/ogg vs mp3

Sorry to burst your bubble, but mp4 is a video container format, much akin to avi, mkv, ogm etc. It's not an audio format :).

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but mp4 is a video container format, much akin to avi, mkv, ogm etc. It's not an audio format :).

Erm, while my usage of the 'mp4' wasn't completely correct (it is a container format), it's a multimedia container format:

is a multimedia container format standard specified as a part of MPEG-4. It is most commonly used to store digital audio and digital video streams, especially those defined by MPEG, but can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images.

That said, it's pretty clear I was talking about aac/mpeg2-7.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Seumas]

I don't see how this would replace jpg in any remote way whatsoever. Where are most images stored and viewed? On the internet and a browser. I need a small, high quality image. I don't need to go visit cnn.com and adjust the tint, hue and color levels of the "breaking news" graphic on their site.

Not to mention, I am highly skeptical of any attempt Microsoft claims to be making toward "standardization".

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[daviddennis]

Isn't it trivial to generate a TIFF from RAW using Photoshop, Aperture, Lightroom or the software that came with the camera?

As for Microsoft's format, if it's not freely usable I don't see it taking off, and others have said it can't be used in GPL style projects, so it's clearly not for me.

It might be nice to have a format that compressed better than JPEG and had higher quality. Does JPEG-2000 render in web browsers?

D

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[dfghjk]

"Doesn't matter, the point is that anyone who's dissatisifed with JPG has allready found an alternative."

That's not what you said. You said "Not going to end jpg - everyone dissatisfied with JPG is already using RAW." RAW is a camera format, not an output format. No one uses RAW as a replacement for jpeg except during image acquisition.

As for everyone already using alternatives, that may be so but that doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement. This may not be the answer but it's naive to think that the image formats we have now are all there will ever be.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[dfghjk]

It may be trivial as long as you don't care about the quality of the output. If that's the case, one would wonder why you shot RAW in the first place.

RAW is not an image format. It's a dump of all the sensor data that can be used to create an image. A very substantial amount of processing is required, some of it subjective, to arrive at an image.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Hawthorne01]

If you'd bothered to read the article before commenting,

<Gerald Butler voice> "Read the article? THIS IS SLASHDOT!!!!!!!!!" </Gerald Butler voice>

:-)

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[modecx]

You said "Not going to end jpg - everyone dissatisfied with JPG is already using RAW.

Yeah, they are using RAW data in the manner you outline, THEN they use TIFF for storing and transporting these images. TIFF is the industry de-facto. So, MS's little format might compress data better. It's not likely going to do much that TIFF can't be adapted to do.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Mac fanboy and regular poster, I *really* wish you'd learn to spell the word

whiny .

On the plus side, maybe you'll inspire the mods to add a "-1, Whiny" modification.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Anonymous Coward]

bzip works better on text than binary data. The speed advantage of a gzip-type algorithm by far and away outweighs the slight compression advantage of bzip. You have to remember that these images are being decompressed millions of times, that's a lot of wasted CPU with bzip.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

As a Mac fanboy and regular poster, I *really* wish you'd learn to spell the word whiny

Both spellings are correct. Sorry.

PS. Why too gutless to login to ask this question?

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[cortana]

I think that those licensing terms are only talking about MS' own code ("Distributable Code", defined as the code and text files (included in the SDK) that you are permitted to distribute). Nothing stops you implementing your own encoder/decoder and distributing it under any terms you want.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Lumpy]

But they completely decimated the mp3 with wma!

Almost nobody uses mp3's anymore because of the superior wma file!

really! why don't you believe me! It's true!

BTW, the TIFF file works far better than the RAW random standard file format. TIFF is at least a standard, RAW is whatever the camera maker thinks it should be at that moment. TIFF is uncompressed and holds a full 64BPP of color.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[kestasjk]

Has PNG had limited uptake? I run into it more often than GIF these days.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear stubear,
    Allow me to introduce myself. I am number six.
    I recommend not using this technology.
    Please update your statistical database accordingly.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[arth1]

The images have to be in higher quality before they're scaled down to the size that's used in the browser. The worse quality you start with, the worse the result is going to be after each conversion.

Besides, there's more to images than just internet. There's magazines, HDTVs with memory slots for showing off your images to vict^Wvisitors, and printed out photographs now replacing developed photographs. Your typical 600x400 jpeg on the internet just won't look good if you try to print it out.
And larger printouts, like 11"x14", won't look good if the original is a jpg no matter what the resolution or compression factor. The compression ensures that you can't get a really smooth gradient between areas of the sky, for example. You'll end up with large bordering areas in different visibly different shades. That's due to jpeg compression being lossy, and really only suited for images displayed with a small colour gamut at a low resolution.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[daviddennis]

What I was seeking to prove was that a requirement to get a TIFF to a news agency would not be a huge hardship as long as the RAW file existed. So if you have a camera incapable of shooting TIFF, you can use Adobe's or Apple's software to automatically convert the RAW file to TIFF.

Is that not pretty much the same as shooting TIFF in the first place, except that you're having Adobe or Apple's software doing the conversion instead of the camera's, and you have more control over the process?

I agree that pro photographers might want to do the conversion with more control. In fact, they would most likely also do similar processing to the TIFF. In fact, starting with RAW gives quite a few more tweaking options and could be a competitive advantage in getting better quality photographs to the news agency.

Did I miss something?

D

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[MP3Chuck]

"which only the high-end cameras can generate."

Not entirely true ... I have a $300 Panasonic that does TIFF. Granted it's higher-end than your typical wallet-sized point-'n-shoot but it's far from a bank-breaking DSLR.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[dave420]

Yup - I worked at company in London that provided images to the media (print & digital), and *everything* was TIFF. We used JPEGs for previews, but the actual production-quality images were massive TIFFs, sometimes over hundreds of megs big. RAW doesn't even get mentioned when discussing image formats for those purposes.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[LoudMusic]

Just try to do freelance for a news agency and watch how quickly they ask you for TIFF files, which only the high-end cameras can generate. What's hysterical about this is I just resave my JPEGs as TIFFs and no one ever says anything.

I think that a lot of the comparisons that other commenters are making are invalid. They're comparing different file types that include massive feature additions like alpha channel or multiple frames. Simply "better compression" is not a feature upgrade, and better compression is damn near worthless these days since a 500GB drive is less than $150 and internet connections are common over 5mbit.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Doppler00]

Why the heck would you generate TIFF files from the camera? The raw file (which varies by manufacturer) has far more data than the TIFF file could have. I'm not sure if TIFF's support 16 bit colors per channel or not, but with a raw format you can reprocesses it into TIFF easily and adjust the brightness levels beyond what you're stuck with on TIFF.

Note I didn't capitalize raw because it's not a format. It's just describing the file.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[moosesocks]

Well.... the whole point of RAW isn't to share files. It's to preserve sensor data EXACTLY as it is received so that it can be processed on a computer, and not on the camera itself. This has numerous advantages, as it is possible to make substantial adjustments to the image without severely compromising image quality.

Because there are various algorithms to do this, it would be downright foolish to send a RAW file to an agency. However, because there's no loss, converting the RAW to a TIFF is trivial, and there's no real reason not to shoot raw unless you don't plan on doing any post-processing. Also, RAW files tend to be smaller than TIFFs when shot on the camera.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Anonymous Coward]

RAW is not an image format. It's a dump of all the sensor data that can be used to create an image. A very substantial amount of processing is required, some of it subjective, to arrive at an image.

Indeed. Said processing happens in the camera when saved in any other format. Still, RAW has more than the sensor data dump - and that is why you can redo the same processing in software on a computer. That is why TIFF is not used by all high-end cameras - reference, look at what Canon 1D Mark III (their latest high-end) supports: RAW and JPEG, just as the rest of their 1D series.

To answer your other question, why shooting RAW - because, a compressed RAW is way smaller than the uncompressed TIFF that you'd get, for instance, from a Nikon D2X. Writing smaller files happens to be faster, too - so you get better burst rates as a bonus (not to mention the difference it makes once one starts dealing with REALLY large images, such as from medium-format digital backs). As for quality, I'd say you're on somewhat shaky ground here. Same input data, 2 processing options (in-camera or on a computer), judging quality differences is bound to be subjective. The argument that the camera manufacturer knows better is not always right - the manufacturer-suplied RAW conversion software had enough cases of producing worse results than 3rd party programs, so trusting them to do the right thing in camera is not always a given. At any rate, if you can provide examples where camera-generated TIFF files were better than TIFFs generated from RAW files (and not from the crappiest-available conversion tool, either) I'm willing to accept your side of the argument.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

I think that those licensing terms are only talking about MS' own code ("Distributable Code", defined as the code and text files (included in the SDK) that you are permitted to distribute).

Correct.

Nothing stops you implementing your own encoder/decoder and distributing it under any terms you want.

Patents.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Anonymous Coward]

> HD Photo Device Porting Kit 1.0

The HDPDPK1.0? Damn, now I need a new acronym for my beta Sourceforge project!

Thanks a lot, MSJerks.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[FLEB]

So, what do you think, is DNG going anywhere as an interchange format? Adobe's really pushing it, but it just doesn't seem to be taking.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Billly Gates]

Many websites will use hd photo because it contains drm so people can not steal their images or hyperlink them unless its on their site.

Also I was on frostwire earlier today and wma and mp4 was about equal to mp3. People use whats on their computer thats free.

I think ms is getting ready in its war agaisnt linux by trying to standardize on as many proprietary patented technology as possible. If joe six packs firefox can not display images but IE can, which browser do you think he would use? (Passive sentance ... whatever)

Re: Nup, No, Nada.

[Dolda2000]

Not going to end jpg - everyone dissatisfied with JPG is already using RAW. Everyone satisified with jpg will stick with jpg.

You might say that now, but would you bet that's going to be verified once the photo import program shipped with Vista is "updated" to save to WMP by default? It's not exactly as if Microsoft doesn't have a history of using their Windows "monopoly" to push other things. If I'm not entirely mistaken, Vista's new and "improved" sound recorded already saves to WMA by default.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[MidnightBrewer]

I read the article, and your comment still needs work. Yes, people are using alternatives, and yet another format seems a bit redundant, especially considering the source. Comparing RAW to JPEG is a poor comparison indeed, as they serve two completely different purposes. RAW is for maintaining the original image data as faithfully as possible; JPEG is for presentation in a low-bandwidth format.

While JPEG is aging and replacements have been in place for several years now, the slow uptake shows that the general public isn't exactly in a hurry to find a better alternative, regardless of what photophiles might think.

You might have been better off using PNG as an example. Not only is it a good format for the low-end (web), it's even used in high end applications such as storing 2D texture maps for 3D animations on the movie-quality level. In the end, it isn't just the camera support that counts; despite Adobe offering to include support, that still leaves a lot of Photoshop-less users out in the cold, and Microsoft's typical bad habit of failing to support OSX and other operating systems is bound to bite it in the rear yet again.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Maurice]

If you are not sure what you can do with TIFF may be you shouldn't knock it, eh? You can use 16 bits per channel in a TIFF. You can also use 64 bit if you really wanted to and to top it off you could make it floating point.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[ACMENEWSLLC]

Wow. My old Sony produces TIF files. So what, who cares? Irfanview can do Batch Conversion/Rename and convert from RAW/JPG whatever to TIF.

Did I mention it's no cost software?

The only thing that will kill of JPG is if someone comes along with a patent and tries to milk it to death.

http://www.google.com/patents?q=jpeg&lr=&sa=N&star t=10

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's hysterical about this is I just resave my JPEGs as TIFFs and no one ever says anything.

Wow. That is hysterical.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[jim3e8]

Hell, why not bump it to 1,024 bits per channel and just make up the image data? The sensor just gives you a suggestion.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Seumas]

And that's precisely my point.

This format is not going to ever give jpg, gif and png a run for their money where it counts. Like a number of other formats (TIFF and RAW for example), this proposed "standard" may reach a level of popularity or even majority on digital cameras and in the realm of magazine cover and DVD cover editing, but you and I aren't going to be storing our photos in this new format and serving them in this format to our visitors via the web or email just like you don't post a whole bunch of huge TIFF images from your camera for your friends to view, after you get home from a party.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because I'm completely and unforgivably offtopic. I'd mod myself "Offtopic" if I had points.

I just checked a few online dictionaries. Apparently, you're partly right. Most, but not all, of them accept "whiney" as an alternate spelling. None of them has it as the preferred spelling.

Even if it's in the dictionary, it just looks wrong.

And, the ultimate test: Google returns more than twice as many hits for "whiny" as it does for "whiney."

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

And, the ultimate test: Google returns more than twice as many hits for "whiny" as it does for "whiney."

I don't doubt it. There's more than twice as many American English speakers as other English speakers.

Looks right to me.

And who cares if you're off topic & modded down? Do you like my current sig/diary?

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Anonymous Coward]

Compression is THE biggest feature. Perhaps you didn't see Canon's new 1D MkIII (just announced). It is a 10MP camera that can shoot 10 frames per second, or 100,000,000 pixels per second. I would expect images to be 3-5MB each, or 30-50MB per second. Flash memory space itself is limited, as is bandwidth writing to the card -- no card lets you write 50MB/s. If better compression can double the number of shots I can take in a burst or double the amount I can shoot before having to worry about my flash card filling up, that is a deal-maker right there.

If you're one of those people who takes months to fill up the 2GB memory card in their camera, you probably don't care about better compression. You don't shoot 2000 images at a football game either. And you probably don't make many 30"x40" prints.

dom

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[AbRASiON]

Since you're already +5 it's pointless to moderate you further.

Basically, you're absoloutely on the money - the HD is there PRECISELY for the reasons you say!
I questioned myself for about 1/10'th of a second before realising it's just dumb speak - PNG can do all that stuff now and a plethora of other formats.

Jesus Microsoft, cmon you don't want people to hate you but for christs sakes work on important things - this is just a waste of manhours.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[vic-traill]

As a Mac fanboy and regular poster, I *really* wish you'd learn to spell the word whiny

Both spellings are correct. Sorry.

OED says 'whiney' has only been around since 1920. Are we supposed to be on top of all these brand-new spellings? Huh?

[/humour]

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[vic-traill]

Most, but not all, of them accept "whiney" as an alternate spelling.

Jesus, now you had to go bringing 'alternate' vs 'alternative' into it.

We'll never get to close posting on this thread.

[/humour]

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[triffid_98]

Huh? They serve two completely different purposes. TIFF is a lossless display format, RAW is a camera specific capture format that lets you (among other things) change image brightness/color saturation without washing everything out. The only real downside besides mandated post-processing is image size. Well, that and the grand+ you'll be blowing on a shiny SLR that supports it.

BTW, the TIFF file works far better than the RAW random standard file format. TIFF is at least a standard, RAW is whatever the camera maker thinks it should be at that moment. TIFF is uncompressed and holds a full 64BPP of color.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Hal_Porter]

2) This technology is patented to the hilt & the licensing terms for the HD Photo Device Porting Kit 1.0 licensing terms specifically exclude copyleft (GPL style) licenses.

Hey Microsoft, I was joking

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[loki_tiwaz]

no mention of wavelet compression? what? precisely what purpose does this serve?

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[TheNetAvenger]

Not going to end jpg - everyone dissatisfied with JPG is already using RAW. Everyone satisified with jpg will stick with jpg.

This is going to enjoy the same sort of limited uptake as jpeg2000 vs jpg, mp4/wma/ogg vs mp3, png vs gif, etc.

Few other things to note:

1) The 'HD' doesn't stand for High Definition, it's just there to get the association with HD TV in consumers minds. *rolls eyes*

2) This technology is patented to the hilt & the licensing terms for the HD Photo Device Porting Kit 1.0 licensing terms specifically exclude copyleft (GPL style) licenses.


Ok, you have so many things confused, I'm not even sure they are worth addressing.

People NEED to go look at the HD specifications and see WHY and WHAT MS is trying to achieve with this new format.

It is designed to work better with digital cameras based on how the imaging chip sends data to the device to be stored.

HD Photo also has several features that could be very important in High Quality images being used on the web, as the format supports mipmaping without having to have a predefined thumbnail.

HD Photo brings several new things to an image standard that DOES NOT exist in any SINGLE image format specification, as well as adding in some impressive new compression, resolution, and bit depth beyond even high end Photo formats.

If MS does as they propose, and release this specification to an independant standards body, why should we not see this as a good thing? Which is what the whole point of the buzz of HD Photo has been on various sites, this is not about them demanding licensing or royalties as the parent poster suggests.

http://news.com.com/Microsoft+Make+our+HD+Photo+fo rmat+a+standard/2100-1012_3-6165004.html

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[modecx]

So, what do you think, is DNG going anywhere as an interchange format? Adobe's really pushing it, but it just doesn't seem to be taking.

Well, I think it's an alright idea, and being based on TIFF and all, it should be pretty easily workable. I think the disadvantage is that a camera supporting DNG will output 16 bits per channel, even though most of the sensors in the industry will resolve 12 bits, at least I think that's how it works, unless they've massaged TIFF into doing 12 bit pixels, and to be honest I'm not all that familiar with how DNG works. Anyway the point is file sizes may be bigger with DNG vs. RAW in some situations.

On the other hand, my experience messing around with DNG is that file sizes are often smaller than my 20D's native RAW files, so they're doing something right, which makes me wonder how much processor time and battery power a camera can afford to put into compressing files this much.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[zippthorne]

IIRC, tiff can contain lossy formats too.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

you have so many things confused, I'm not even sure they are worth addressing.

Well, you could at least try... In your post you didn't even identify them.

this is not about them demanding licensing or royalties as the parent poster suggests.

he did nothing of the sort.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[drgonzo59]

DNG can compress raw data (without loss). It basically wraps TIFF and adds extra meta-information about camera settings. But note that not all TIFF tags are supported so it is not a strict extension of TIFF.

I personally would choose PNG. Compared to TIFF...

It's pros:
1. Newer, very open (TIFF might have problems with its optional LZW compression scheme)
2. Has better compression than TIFF
3. More uniform standard (there are 200+ version of TIFF files and there is always some program that cannot decode some TIFF file).
It's cons:
4. Cannot encode images as CMYK, while TIFF can. Unless you need to print (on a real printer not inkjet) immediatly this doesn't apply.

So I choose PNG. JPEG2000 is actually better format with a much better lossless encoding in theory but there aren't that many applications that support it yet...

Here's my workflow:

Camera[Pentax K10D] -> PEF [proprietary Pentax RAW file]
Copy PEF to PC
Delete the bad (unrecoverable) ones
Archive raw PEF files to backup file server
Process raw PEF files -> PNG [sharpen, fix WB, etc.]
Archive PNG files to backup file server
Delete raw PEF files from PC, but keep PNGs

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[pointwood]

Well, there isn't any problems in making a TIFF from a RAW. RAW gives you the best post-processing options, which is why it is the preferred way by many. Sadly RAW is problematic (it is not an open format) as well which you can read about on http://openraw.org/

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Ilgaz]

Also where is OS X support of a format which will "overtake" JPEG? It could be done via Quicktime codec. Where is it?

It is simple, MS should look to their advertising agencies. They should ask what happens if an image is not supported at OS X or even OS 9.

Everyone will remind JPEG 2000 but JPEG 2000 is supported out of the box on OS X. Ask Apple why they pay such a price to Kakadu to include that format in every OS X installation. It is simple: DTP.

I would compare it to WMA. Thanks to MS bribes, it is supported on every device except iPod and nobody (general public) touches it.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[lundqvist]

I think thats the point of it, its patented .. Microsoft is devoting lots of time to patents because it feels threatened by Open Source. It doesnt matter that anyone who knows what they are doing will work with the formats they know work for them. Microsoft will appeal to the masses of people that buy off the shelf boxes preinstalled with whatever MS want, then simply wait until those customers flood the net with their formats, forcing others to adopt them as well. Thats when MS get a return on the deal. In a way its good business sense but I wish Microsoft would spend as much time making their products work properly with already agreed standards as they seem to do creating new ones that nobody wants to follow.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Big Nothing]

"TIFF files, which only the high-end cameras can generate."

I don't wanna pop your balloon, but my ex-gf's $200 HP crap camera could generate TIFF. In my experience, TIFF is usually generated as a lossless format by low-end cameras, while higher end cameras usually generate some raw format file. This being sais, you are correct in that agencies usually want TIFF, simply because it's a standardized, lossless format that virtually every piece of software out there can convert to. Raw, JPG, DNG, PNG or whatever format your camera outputs, it can alwast be converted to TIFF, and the agency can always read your image.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[trifish]

Everyone satisified with jpg will stick with jpg

Why would they stay with a format when a much better format in the category is available?

with computational and memory performance more closely comparable to JPEG and delivers a lossy compressed image of better perceptive quality than JPEG at less than half the file size

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[walt-sjc]

Microsoft's format is supposed to store images with the same resolution and loss, but only use half the space of jpeg. If and ONLY if Microsoft's format is REALLY open, with a license that is GPL v2 and proposed v3 compatible, THEN I would go for it, but we need to hear from the legal experts on that. So we need to wait and see. It could be a good thing for the net.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Dogtanian]

Allow me to introduce myself. I am number six. Have you given up on all that "I am not a number! I am a free man!" stuff, then?

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Bloke down the pub]

Doesn't matter, the point is that anyone who's dissatisifed with JPG has allready found an alternative.

So which web browsers 'allready' have support for raw? Hardly an alternative, then.

support in the camera is the support that matters.

Cameras are for taking pictures, not for looking at them. Now what's the point of taking them if people can't look at them?

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[mlewan]

"However, because there's no loss, converting the RAW to a TIFF is trivial, "

I think "trivial" is the wrong word. "Possible" would be better. As you mention yourself, there are plenty of different ways to convert RAW to TIFF, and the tweaking to get an optimal result is often very demanding.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Wheely]

Not really accurate this. RAW isn't actually a format at all and shouldn't really be capitalised. The term "raw" only refers to unmanipulated data.

By the way, all digital cameras shoot "RAW", it's just that many immediately convert these data to a format that you can actually see, e.g jpeg.

On the other hand, I agree with your point here. I see no problem with a new and improved image format except that Microsoft has a dubious history of making it extremely annoying for everyone to be able to read their standards.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

Not entirely true ... I have a $300 Panasonic that does TIFF. Granted it's higher-end than your typical wallet-sized point-'n-shoot but it's far from a bank-breaking DSLR. Well, let's say it one more time: RAW is not TIFF, TIFF is not RAW, etc. RAW is trying to get as much raw data from the camera sensors as possible. TIF and PNG are representation of a photo in rgb space, RAW uses a different color space even if your camera has r,g and b sensors. The idea is that automatic conversion of raw sensor data into TIF is a lossy process, i.e you can actually squeeze more out of the raw data (let's say some details in the shadows, or smoother gradation of colors or whatever) by more careful processing of the sensor data.
Some rough analogy with the analog photography would be giving somebody to develop your black and white negatives instead developing them yourself.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

I don't see how this would replace jpg in any remote way whatsoever. Where are most images stored and viewed? On the internet and a browser. I need a small, high quality image. I don't need to go visit cnn.com and adjust the tint, hue and color levels of the "breaking news" graphic on their site. If this is all you need maybe the Microsoft new standard would be exactly what you need?

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[petermgreen]

However, because there's no loss
on the contary there is a lot of loss (and a lot of added bloat as well) going from raw CCD data to a RGB bitmap (which tiff then losslessly encodes) that is the whole point of having raw formats in the first place.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Anonymous Coward]

Many pro level digital cameras replace the consumer "RAW" image with TIFF.
Fuji S5, Hasselblad, etc... Consumer and Pro Consumer level cameras like the canon line use their proprietary RAW format. TIFF holds more information than the RAW formats do. a full 64 bits per pixel. only the highest end digitals even go to 48 bits per pixel.

so your arguments that you can do adjustments without image damage are not realistic when compared to TIFF.

I know, unlike most armchairs here I am a professional photographer and deal with this stuff daily.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Dan Ost]

TIFF supports JPEG-style compression (don't remember if that was in the original standard or if it was added later).

Actually, TIFF supports multiple compression methods.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Anonymous Coward]

...that is the whole point of having raw formats in the first place.

No, this is plain nonsense. The whole fskcing point of RAW is that it is NOT as lossy as JPG. For a start there is not one RAW format but many different RAW formats. And, surprise, there are even sensors that capture directly in RGB. Also there are several RAW format that are lossy (altough it is less terrible than the poor JPG).

The world of high-quality photograph wouldn't be that different if cameras were shooting directly in PNG or TIFF instead of RAW... Though it would be WAY crappier if only JPG was allowed. Remember that you MUST convert to TIFF (for print) or to PNG (for screen) at one point, otherwise your RAW image is meaningless (how are you going to look at it!?).

The main point of RAW is that it doesn't use crappy compression (in some case it can be lossy, but only slightly). The internal details of the format are then dictated by the sensors.

And don't forget that converting from RAW to something else (eg PNG or TIFF) is unavoidable for there aren't any output device that can do anything with most RAW formats (TIFF is a lossless and nice as one can be for print, while PNG is as lossless and nice as one can be for screen), no, not even the digital camera's built-in screen ;)

You don't seem to understand the difference between lossy (as in JPG) and lossless (as in PNG) and you don't seem to realize that RAW is meaningless when no output device can process this format. As long as there can be lossless conversion to/from TIFF and PNG, a digital camera outputting TIFF (which some btw) and/or PNG would be all that's needed. (This is not totally true as keeping the RAW format can be interesting when nicer RAW --> RGB conversion algorithms are found).

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[EddydaSquige]

I think you missunderstand the purpose of DNG. It contains no color space of its own. I suppose that RAW is RGB because the sensors are (RAW is essentially a sensor dump), but you can output the color in any color space, RGB, CMYK, LAB. It's up to you. In your work flow, the DNG would replace the PEF file not the PNG. DNG is just a unform wraper for RAW files, not a delivery format.

This has huge advantages. First, the individual camera manufactures use their own snarky implementaion of RAW even though they're all basically the same at the core, even within the manufatures the formats change. For instance a Canon CR2 on a 5D, 30D, and Mark 2 are all different and not interchangable. You don't know if the camera manufacture will suddenly drop support for a particular implimentation, leaving your older files in a lurch. You might not be able to get your photographs. DNG will be supported longer and more thoroughly then PEF in the future.

Second, from a workflow it's great. If you use multiple, different cameras, it provides unformity. It contains all of it metadata internaly, whereas many formats (all that I've encountered so far) produce side car files, giving you extra things to have to orginize.

My workflow goes something like this:

RAW>DNG (general color correction and cropping done here)
DNG>16 bit PSD (all photoshop done here)
PSD>8 bit TIFF & JPG (final flatened format, given to clients)

Anywhere from 40 to 100 images go through my hands this way every day. Each transition step (ie DNG to PSD) is automated and does needed sizeing, sharpening, or anything else that does not change image to image.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Anonymous Coward]

mp4/wma/ogg vs mp3
eh...mp4 is a video container

mis-informative is probably the best way to describe your comment, but this is slashdot after all :)

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[drinkypoo]

The RAW format is not a simple RGB bitmap. It contains additional data about the image, let alone about other crap. The whole point of RAW is that you can create the TIFF (or whatever) you want, not the TIFF that the camera thinks you want.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[drinkypoo]

Doesn't matter, the point is that anyone who's dissatisifed with JPG has allready found an alternative.

No, in fact they have not.

I am developing a webpage for my employer. I am dissatisfied with JPEG. In particular the artifacting seems to be worse than many other formats. But those other formats don't work on the web. PNG tends to produce larger image sizes. PNG-8 is handy for little widgety graphics, but not useful for anything photographic. GIF, same problem. So what are my other options? Oh wait, there aren't any.

Consequently the page uses a combination of all three formats. Some items, which are simply too large in any other format, are JPEG images. Some items are PNGs, especially anywhere I can get away with a very low color depth (anything 32 colors or less is always PNG; most things 64 colors are PNG.) Where I need transparency, I simply must use GIF, which limits the ways in which I can use it. This is because IE6 (still by far the most popular browser) doesn't properly display transparent PNGs. Even with the AlphaImageLoader hack, something like one-third of the time the image appears non-transparent. Or at least that's what happened to me.

If you'd bothered to read the article before commenting, you would know that support in the camera is the support that matters.

Not to me. To me, the support in the browser is what matters. As long as the camera shoots a raw format, or at least an uncompressed format, I can make any format I want once I get it to my computer. Support in the camera is utterly irrelevant. And frankly, most of the images I use are not shot with a digital camera, at least not by me. They could be digital photos or scans of real ones and it makes no difference to me because I'm typically reducing their resolution significantly, and repackaging them for the web.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[petermgreen]

The RAW format is not a simple RGB bitmap. It contains additional data about the image, let alone about other crap. The whole point of RAW is that you can create the TIFF (or whatever) you want, not the TIFF that the camera thinks you want.
my point exactly, to put it another way you can decide what data to throw away when making your TIFF from your RAW rather than letting the camera decide.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[petermgreen]

You don't seem to understand the difference between lossy (as in JPG) and lossless (as in PNG)
I do, png can losslessly store a 24 or 48 bit RGB image JPG can't.

it is the raw (as in raw data from the sensor)-rgb conversion that always involves loss.

And, surprise, there are even sensors that capture directly in RGB.
i think there are a few layered sensors but i belive they are the exception not the rule. Afaict most sensors involve a monochrome sensor with a color pattern filter on top.

and even if they do the color balancing and gamma of the sensor is unlikely to match what most people want in thier RGB image.

so conversion is needed and that conversion almost inevitablly involves loss (either rounding, saturation or both)

while it is true that you can't directly see the information in the raw image you can see different parts of it by using different converter settings. Or maybe you might want to run some kind of denoising algorithm before adding in the artifacts of the conversion to rgb.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[modecx]

For instance a Canon CR2 on a 5D, 30D, and Mark 2 are all different and not interchangable. You don't know if the camera manufacture will suddenly drop support for a particular implimentation, leaving your older files in a lurch.

While true, we have both open and closed implementations for rasterizing raw files from just about every camera from just nearly every manufacturer. It's doubtful that anyone will have great difficulty to access their camera generated negatives anytime the foreseeable future.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Gnavpot]

However, because there's no loss
on the contary there is a lot of loss (and a lot of added bloat as well) going from raw CCD data to a RGB bitmap (which tiff then losslessly encodes) that is the whole point of having raw formats in the first place.

I think you misunderstood the GP's words. Both of you probably agree very much on this topic.

Since you stripped the end of the sentence, I will repeat it in full:

However, because there's no loss, converting the RAW to a TIFF is trivial, and there's no real reason not to shoot raw unless you don't plan on doing any post-processing.

So, the GP was not stating that there is no loss in the conversion. He was merely stating that there is no loss, and it is pretty obvious that he means "no loss in the raw data". The rest of the sentence translates into: Since there is no loss in the raw data, you can make the raw-to-TIFF conversion afterwards without adding more loss than the camera would have done if saving directly to TIFF.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[dedazo]

Interesting, I went direct from 35mm SLR to DSLR and really never had the need to buy P&S digitals, but I guess I am surprised that some of them can generate TIFF... the problem with TIFF is that it's HUGE and it takes a while to write to SD or CF or whatever you're using... most low- to mid-end DSLRs can't do TIFF. I didn't think a $200 P&S would have that kind of horsepower.

As to converting from RAW, yes, the problem is that often times you're filing direct and you don't have time to run 400 shots though a RAW converter. Ergo the need for the camera to do TIFF.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[ncc74656]

I think the disadvantage is that a camera supporting DNG will output 16 bits per channel, even though most of the sensors in the industry will resolve 12 bits, at least I think that's how it works, unless they've massaged TIFF into doing 12 bit pixels, and to be honest I'm not all that familiar with how DNG works.

That may be the situation now, but who's to say that won't change in the future? It sounds like they've put in a little future-proofing. Compare to CDs and CD players when they were introduced...the media stored 16 bits per channel per sample, but many (most? all?) of the first CD players were only equipped with 14-bit DACs. Should the format have been limited to 14-bit samples, or should they have gone 16-bit on the assumption that equipment would improve to take advantage of it?

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[GreedyCapitalist]

"This technology is patented to the hilt & the licensing terms for the HD Photo Device Porting Kit 1.0 licensing terms specifically exclude copyleft (GPL style) licenses."

This applies to the code in the kit, not the HD photo standard itself:

"HD Photo, the specification is made available under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise, which asserts that Microsoft offers the specification for free, and will not file suit on the patented technology, and that open-source software can therefore make use of the format"

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[modecx]

I fail to understand your point, and the CD analog, (no pun intended). If camera manufacturers begin to make models with sensors that resolve better than 12 bits (indeed some do 14 bits per pixel today, then their raw files will likely reflect this unless the camera downsamples for whatever reason. In the meanwhile, it dosen't make much sense to encode 12+ bits of extra precision, per pixel, if it's not necessary. If your compression is good enough, and your sample size large enough, you might be able to regain some of the memory used for that extra, useless precision, but it's going to come at the cost of CPU, battery, and buffer memory.

With your CD example, it makes sense that some players came with 14 bit DACs, probably because people didn't want to pay for equipment that had 16 bit DACs, and let's face it, 14 bits and crappy DACs are more than plenty for the pop music that most people play. Just the same, 8 bit JPEGs are good enough for most people, so that's what they get.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[NeMon'ess]

everyone dissatisfied with JPG is already using RAW. Everyone satisified with jpg will stick with jpg.

Except for the many compact digital camera users who are annoyed with Canon and the other manufacturers refusing to add RAW capability to compact-sized cameras. Canon actually removed RAW from the G7, which the G6 can do. Which is really frustrating, because compact cameras are small enough to comfortably fit in a jacket pocket or bag because they aren't three inches thick.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Laur]

Where I need transparency, I simply must use GIF, which limits the ways in which I can use it. This is because IE6 (still by far the most popular browser) doesn't properly display transparent PNGs.

I thought that IE6 displayed PNG binary transparency just fine, it is only PNG alpha transparency that IE6 has a problem with. Since GIF only does binary transparency, I have not idea why you'd want to use GIF over PNG for any case other than animation (which PNG does not support). Perhaps you can enlighten me?

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[drinkypoo]

I thought that IE6 displayed PNG binary transparency just fine, it is only PNG alpha transparency that IE6 has a problem with. Since GIF only does binary transparency, I have not idea why you'd want to use GIF over PNG for any case other than animation (which PNG does not support). Perhaps you can enlighten me?

When I do bitmapped transparency I don't create very large images. So I might as well use GIF which is apprehended by more software.

When I create nontransparent bitmapped images though, I usually use PNG, because it produces smaller files (although not much smaller.)

Meh

[Desert Raven]

I predict it will succeed in displacing jpg just like png displaced both gif and jpg.

Re:Meh

[TubeSteak]

I predict it will succeed in displacing jpg just like png displaced both gif and jpg.

When MS adds "HD Photo" into the next OS (or patches it into Vista) & their line of Office programs as the default, what do you think is going to happen?

FTFA:
"Microsoft said HD Photo's lightweight algorithm causes less damage to photos during compression, with higher-quality images that are half the size of a JPEG."

PNG has well known limitations when it comes to photographs.
Size is a big one of them.

Re:Meh

[Tim Browse]

"Microsoft said HD Photo's lightweight algorithm causes less damage to photos during compression, with higher-quality images that are half the size of a JPEG."

Didn't they say that about wma vs mp3? It wasn't true then...

Re:Meh

[GrievousMistake]

They did. 'CD quality at 64 kbps' my ass. It saved me a blind testing of the format though, since anyone who lies that blatantly obviously can't be trusted with my data.
Thing is, though, a lot of my more computer illiterate acquaintances would rip their CDs at that bitrate, with DRM to boot, simply because that was the default setting in Windows Media Player, and it labeled it as 'CD quality'.
Why they didn't seem to notice that their music collection sounded like an old and crappy car FM radio, and that anything they downloaded as 128kbps mp3 beat it by a mile, I'll never know.

Re:Meh

[petermgreen]

lots of people don't have the equipment, the ears or both to tell the difference

i've ripped mp3 at 64k mono using the xing encoder (which i belive is regarded as pretty shitty compared to some modern encoders, it is FAST though) and most people i've met can't hear anything wrong with it. For most people FM radio is perfectly acceptable quality for pop music.

turning on drm by default is kind of shooting your own format in the foot too, lots of people may rip to it but its not going to be going very far if its drm'd

PNG

[MichaelSmith]

I thouht PNG was supposed to be the end of JPEG

OTH perhaps this will be the end of "JPG"

Re:PNG

[JeepFanatic]

I thought PNG was supposed to replace GIF because it can do transparencies and because GIF used to be encumbered by patent issues while PNG was open.

Re:PNG

[Tumbleweed]

PNG was not supposed to replace JPEG; it was supposed to replace GIF. Unfortunately, thanks to massive delays in getting PNG support correctly working in IE, that never happened. Also, some people still insist they need animated GIFs, which PNG doesn't do (see MNG, which is nowhere). It's sad, as for most file sizes of images appropriate for GIF, PNG was way smaller (unless you get way, WAY small, as in under 150bytes or so (not kilobytes, BYTES). Also, Adobe is still unable to provide decent compression on the PNGs its software generates, so to this day, you need compression tools like pngout or pngcrush (pngout usually produces smaller files). Weird that you can still lossly compress a lossy image, but whatever.

This won't be the end of anything unless it is unemcumbered by patents, and as a previous poster noted, it isn't. So, this is a non-event.

Perhaps the group that came up with PNG can come up with a patent-free replacement for JPEG?

Re:PNG

[280Z28]

PNG was "supposed to replace" GIF when Unisys made a move to collect unexpected royalties on GIFs used on the web. And for many designers, it has replaced it with smaller file sizes and lossless compression options. Unfortunately it doesn't support animation and MNG never gained the steam PNG did, so GIF will still be around for a while.

Re:PNG

[Megane]

I thought PNG was supposed to replace GIF because it can do transparencies and because GIF used to be encumbered by patent issues while PNG was open.

"PNG images are almost completely superior to GIFs except for the fact they do not support animations, therefore making them, for all intents and purposes of ruining browsers, useless."

Re:PNG

[mad.frog]

Also, Adobe is still unable to provide decent compression on the PNGs its software generates

Not so. Fireworks has always had one of the best PNG compressors of any editing app. (You may be fooled by its native file format, which is PNG with a ton of metadata embedded... exporting as a PNG will lose the metadata but make it WAY smaller.)

A google for "pngcrush fireworks" turns up many such references, e.g.,

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/02/08/optimi zing_png_files

Re:PNG

[Tumbleweed]

Fireworks is a Macromedia product that Adobe acquired. If it's got great PNG compression, such compression has certainly NOT made it into Photoshop as of CS2. Hopefully CS3 will see such ability.

Won't End JPG

[popo]

If you're not discarding data when you're adjusting color-balance and other settings, you're by definition not compressing as much as you possibly can.

For example, if I desaturate a photo I'm throwing away tons of color information. If that color information is still being written to the file, the file isn't as small as it could be.

Aside from that, PNG should have dethroned JPG long ago for the very simple reason that it contains an alpha channel -- but I still see plenty of JPG's.

Re:Won't End JPG

[jmv]

Aside from that, PNG should have dethroned JPG long ago for the very simple reason that it contains an alpha channel -- but I still see plenty of JPG's.

I think that statement alone disqualifies you for giving any sort of opinion on image format. PNG and JPEG are totally different formats, trying to compress different types of images. Each of then sucks at what the other one does well.

Re:Won't End JPG

[TubeSteak]

Aside from that, PNG should have dethroned JPG long ago for the very simple reason that it contains an alpha channel -- but I still see plenty of JPG's.

Remember 1995? Dial up modems? 1 megapixel cameras?
Back when file size mattered?

PNG never took over because you end up with files that are 5~10 times greater than JPG. It was a technology ahead of its time.

P.S. PNG was supposed to dethrone GIF

Re:Won't End JPG

[Mr. Underbridge]

For example, if I desaturate a photo I'm throwing away tons of color information. If that color information is still being written to the file, the file isn't as small as it could be.

Maybe, but if it gets rid of detail - which is the only way it would get markedly smaller when desaturating - is that what you really want to do? I think the idea isn't really related to compression, but of reversibility - I'm guessing that the color balance info is stored somewhere in the file along with some compressed (or not) version of the raw pixel info, with color levelling being done on the fly when viewing.

In any event, in situations you describe, JPG will still be around for you if it's what you want..

Re:Won't End JPG

[Weirsbaski]

If you're not discarding data when you're adjusting color-balance and other settings, you're by definition not compressing as much as you possibly can.

By that reasoning, any image file more than 1 byte long isn't compressed "as much as possible".

Re:Won't End JPG

[petermgreen]

Remember 1995? Dial up modems? 1 megapixel cameras? Back when file size mattered?
yes speeds are increasing but here in the uk the bottom end of "broadband" is only a few times faster than the fastest dialup which in turn is less than twice as fast as the modems that were current in that era.

many people are still using dialup either because they are light users, simply can't get broadband (at prices that are acceptable to normal customers, i am aware of the existance of leased lines and satalite links. Satalite links also have high latency which throws away much if not all of the percieved speed gain when browsing) or are on the move and can't rely on being able to connect to a network at the places they visit. Mobile data is also generally similar speeds to dialup and often has high per megabyte costs as well.

and consumer cameras are now at 5 megapixel or so

and hosting providers still charge significant prices per gigabyte so there is a definite incentive for webauthors to keep filesize down.

So what has changed in the last decade (here in the uk at least).
1: average net speeds for heavy users have increased significantly to the point where a web page loads instantly.
2: consumers have an increased taste for larger media, audio and video have become much more common and image sizes have grown with the capabilties of cameras and scanner handling software (handling an image of more than a megapixel or so on a 486 with 8 megs of ram is pretty impractical)
2: the gap between users has also increased a lot and is much harder for the user to close, in the old days all you needed to increase your speed was a one off payment for a better modem but to get beyond the 56K barrier you have to take out a subscription for every location you wan't that speed out on top of the normal phone line cost, and the time for getting it at a new site may be as high as a fortnight. Youd better check your site works ok over a crappy modem link because that is how it may have to be acccessed in a pinch and you don't want to lose a good customer because of that. (remember while the poor are on dialup so are those who are fairly rich but stuck in an awkward postition)
3: lots more people are on the net overall
4: p2p has come in and has been retailiated against with massive traffic limiting and dishonesty on the part of ISPs. Speeds on consumer internet connections have become very unpredictable and nowhere near what is being advertised.

Re:Won't End JPG

[HeroreV]

PNG should have dethroned JPG long ago for the very simple reason that it contains an alpha channel

A more realistic alternative would be JNG, which is uses JPEG compression and can store an alpha channel.

Re:hmmm

[j3richo]

they rammed it down your throat by making it an optional accessory?

What's the catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

JPEG and PNG are fine, if we want a HDR capable lossless image format we'll use OpenEXR (No George, we still don't forgive you for Jar Jar). Why do Microsoft have to keep re-inventing the wheel? OpenEXR has mad force powers, Microsoft image formats smell like Ballmers toe nail clippings. What have they patented or what DRM switch and bait are Microsoft trying to pull with this move?

Re:What's the catch?

[SpaceLifeForm]

That would be the best way for Microsoft to embed
binary code in the image.

Re:What's the catch?

[neuro.slug]

Sweet. I'm putting format c: in my HD Photo's autoexec.bat block. ;)

Re:What's the catch?

[ChrisA90278]

"Why do Microsoft have to keep re-inventing the wheel?"

That's their business model. It works well too. It goes like this: Invent new file format. Make new format the default for microsoft programs. Then as people start to distribute the new files others find they need Microsoft software to read the files. It works because users are stupid, they will save using the default format and then attach it to some email.

Re:What's the catch?

[pchan-]

Ah, but you don't understand. This image format can do one thing that none of the rest of them can:
It can contain an encrypted payload that only displays on monitors using HDCP connected to a computer that's booted a Trusted Platform OS, and the content can refuse to display if you haven't paid a subscription fee, its timeout has expired, or you've seen it too many times.

Re:What's the catch?

[dkf]

Hmm, that sounds very much like "Mad (Dark Side of the) Force Powers" to me.

Of course not.

[RyanFenton]

It just doesn't work that way, folks. Unless Microsoft's new format somehow involves the creation of time-traveling assassins to retroactively prevent its creation, the .JPG file format will continue to exist.

Ryan Fenton

Re:Of course not.

[A3gis]

dont forget they can write support for it out of IE.. bad move marketingwise of course, but hey, they're big industry, they can do whatever they want with their products and people will continue to use them.

Re:Of course not.

[Anonymous Coward]

The creation of those Microsoft "time-traveling assassins"® is IP that you do not have permission to possess, distribute, consider, think about, refer to, or otherwise have any association with however tenuous. You are in violation of the TOS, EULA, and eternal goodwill of MS Bob. Please reformat your hard-drive and send us your first-born child.

Re:Of course not.

[ceoyoyo]

Not anymore they can't. Firefox is big enough to stop them from doing over the top stupid stuff like that anymore. They even had to fix IE7 somewhat!

PNG with bzip2 compression?

[Anonymous Coward]

The PNG format uses the DEFLATE compression algorithm to minimize its data size. DEFLATE is the same compression method used by gzip. We all know that for larger files, the bzip2 compression utility tends to obtain better compression ratios than gzip. So would it not be possible to use the bzip2 algorithm instead of DEFLATE when compressing the image data, to obtain a smaller image file size at the cost of greater compression and decompression times?

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it would be possible, but you have to ask:

• Does "block-sorting" improve compression of images as much as compression of text/code/data?
• Is space more valuable than time? CPUs are becoming faster, but storage is becoming cheaper too...

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[Silverlancer]

Why not use LZMA then, which is both faster and has better compression than bzip2?

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[putaro]

Is space more valuable than time? CPUs are becoming faster, but storage is becoming cheaper too...

Don't forget that it's no longer just space/time tradeoffs. There's also the network bandwidth tradeoff. And network bandwidth is not on the same kind of curve as CPU's or storage at least for WANs.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[cortana]

It is not faster, and in addition, it is much less space-efficient.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[rbanffy]

bzip2 is much more resource-intensive than gzip.

In 2001 I considered using bzlib to compress some data files in the Brazilian electronic voting system and, since we had to support older, 386-class hardware with little memory, we went the gzip route.

Later some Windows fanboy decided they should use .zip instead of .tgz for the files and someone else recoded that piece.

Consider we are not talking only desktop PCs, but low-end embedded and photographic equipment.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[gfody]

Must we combine data compression with the image format?

I think ideally the PNG format would stop at filtering and just leave you with a file that compresses well.

We could also cover lossy compression in PNG with lossy filters. Lossy filters would result in a file that is even more compressible. If we separate filtering from compression than you would always have lots of choices. Maybe I want to spend 3 hours and PAQ it - who knows how important the file size may be.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's slower and has worse compression for images?

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[amRadioHed]

That sounds like a good idea from a technical standpoint. OTOH, what's the point of having a standard file format if you still can't view the image because you don't have the codec it needs?

TIFF had a problem like that in it's early days when the name was said to stand for "Thousands of Incompatible File Formats". The same things happens today when I try to open a .avi file and find out I need the latest and greatest codec from Windows Media Player in order to view it. We really do need to agree on a standard codec as well as container format so that anything that claims to read .foo files can indeed read all your .foo files.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[harmonica]

In theory, yes. There is a byte compression type in the PNG headers.

The PNG people (some of them?) don't want to use this, though, for maximum compatibility of readers and files. I don't have a source handy, so take this with a big grain of salt.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[dougmc]

The same things happens today when I try to open a .avi file and find out I need the latest and greatest codec from Windows Media Player in order to view it.

Well, you obviously already realize this, but .avi is a container, not an encoding method. It sounds like you want to tie container and codec together, or at least name the file based on the codec in use rather than the container.

On the down side, just because it says .avi, that doesn't mean your system has the codecs needed to play whatever it is.

On the plus side, it means we're still using .avi, years later -- because it's not tied to any specific codecs that will probably become obsolete over time.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[Anonymous Coward]

[blockquote]least name the file based on the codec in use rather than the container[/blockquote]

That would be the preferable.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[bzipitidoo]

PNG with bzip2 is not worth it. PNG restarts the compression on each row. Compressing with PNG is like chopping a 1000000 byte file into 1000 files of 1000 bytes each, and then compressing the pieces separately. The method used in bzip2 works best on large chunks of data-- all the data in one big chunk if you can manage it. At 1000 bytes per chunk, bzip2 and gzip compress about equally well. At even smaller sizes, gzip is often better.

bzip2 on the raw image data actually competes very well with PNG. Sometimes PNG is better, and sometimes "raw.bz2" is better.

And yes, transforming the data before applying a compression algorithm is best of all. PNG actually does do that. A real simple transform (which PNG uses) that can help a lot is just feeding the difference between adjacent pixels to the compressor, rather than the pixel values themselves. For instance, bzip2 compresses the color version of the famous Lena image (512x512x24) to about 585k. But if you feed it the differences between adjacent pixel values, the compressed size drops to 512k. Another very easy change takes you quite a bit further. Rotate the image 90 degrees, then do the difference between adjacent pixels, and then compress with bzip2. Final result will be around 475k.

So why doesn't PNG do these things? The designers were interested in more than compression. They wanted to accomodate slow connections by making it possible to see some of an image without having to download the entire thing. They wanted a bit more robustness, so that a few bad bytes wouldn't make the entire image undecodable. However, it does seem like those are not the problems they were 10 or 15 years ago, not with it becoming possible to fling an entire movie's worth of data over the Internet in a few minutes, or carry the same around on one DVD. Now you don't mess around with some error checking protocol like zmodem in case you get a few bad bytes. Instead you have your browser reload the whole thing if there's some problem that gets past TCP/IP. So maybe MS is right in that it's time to update our image formats. But MS is stupid if they think they can make something that is enough better than PNG and JPEG that people will feel it's worth the cost of moving to a proprietary, patented, locked down, and mostly unsupported format.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[ThePhilips]

bzip2 is much more CPU intensive on both encoding and decoding. On average it is about 30-40% slower than gzip and takes more memory for decompression. (Try to imaging that Opera/Firefox got even bigger memory foot print and page rendering degraded by 25% percents.)

Also, bzip2 is good with large amounts of information. And surprisingly PNG isn't the case: not the whole image is compressed but group of adjacent lines. That's done to allow network usage: user can see parts of image before it is completely downloaded.

Also since gzip's decompression is very simple and already heavily tested you get another advantage for network usage: security. We all heard of overflow bug in gzip (which allowed remote execution exploit) - but have anybody heard of such research on bzip2? There is none.

Overall, gzip provides very good compromise of performance and compression ratio. And that's why it is so popular.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[Ilgaz]

My cell phone (SE K700i) can view PNG files very easily and its running 109 Mhz Arm 9. I am sure PNG people are considering such devices/platforms while designing the format.

PNG is not suitable for photo compression. For funny sizes without losing quality, it is Jpeg 2000 but the idiots owning the rights to format are trying to leech ordinary people and ask for $$$ for very simple photos which has nothing to do with 39 mpixel etc. stuff used in advertising agencies. I can't imagine the price they ask for camera bundle since a basic Irfanview plugin to save ordinary (consumer level) jpeg 2000 is $30!

http://www.luratech.com/shop/index.jsp?categoryKey =27

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've investigated GRZip for my home-made yet-to-be-made-public build and packaging system. It runs faster and compresses much better than bzip2 (the improvement in size is similar to going from gzip to bzip2). 7zip is not as good as GRzip and the implementations are poor and mainly for Windows.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[Anonymous Coward]

Having attempted to port p7zip to an unsupported POSIX platform I can attest that support for 7Zip outside of Windows is complete ass. p7zip itself itself is mostly the original Win32 sources with a bunch of a half-assed Win32->POSIX wrappers that are not only semi-functional, but also exhibit completely insane behaviour. There is a portable LZMA implementation available but no one has yet written a 7z client around it (at least, not a useful client. There are a bunch of 7z implementations for scripting languages, but they're no use to me)

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[Bert64]

When PNG was designed, a 109mhz processor would have been considered very fast.
When JPEG was first designed, it took 30+ seconds to decode and display a 640x480 file...
So maybe now is the right time to use a slower but more efficient compression routine, as it would almost certainly still be faster on modern computers than JPEG/PNG were when new. Although, with the greater availability of bandwidth nowadays there's also less of a need for such compression anyway.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[chrish]

I'd just like to say that there's nothing Windows-specific about the .zip format.

In fact, Info-ZIP's (http://www.info-zip.org/) unzip is the second most-portable application around (the first being C-Kermit).

The format was actually designed as expandable (imagine that!), and over the years it's been updated to store the extra meta-data for pretty much every filesystem out there (UNIX permission, BFS extra attributes, old Mac OS file type/creator, new Mac OS extended attributes, NTFS ACLs, NTFS extended attributes, OS/2 extended attributes, etc.).

I use .zip files for backups and whatnot all the time because of the extreme portability, and the ability to randomly access any file/directory inside the file without having to decompress the whole thing.

Very nice!

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[hackstraw]

TIFF had a problem like that in it's early days when the name was said to stand for "Thousands of Incompatible File Formats". The same things happens today when I try to open a .avi file and find out I need the latest and greatest codec from Windows Media Player in order to view it.

At least TIFF meant the image was a TIFF in a known format. I'm assuming the problem was that people only half implemented the standards in the beginning, but they were at least known.

Cute snippet from wikipedia:

Every TIFF file begins with a 2-byte indicator of byte order: "II" for little endian and "MM" for big endian byte ordering. The following 2 bytes represent the number 42. The number 42 was selected "for its deep philosophical significance." What pisses me off is that today, an AVI could stand for "Any Video Inside". You have no idea what is inside of an AVI file without opening it. Its just a container, with unknown contents.

I'm not a codec geek, so could someone explain the benefits of having a container with unknown crap inside of it? OGG is the same way. I don't know the details, but from what I've heard calling an OGG an OGG is useless because it could have Vorbis encoded or FLAC (which is a container and a codec combined) or I guess something else.

Yuck.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[penp]

The same things happens today when I try to open a .avi file and find out I need the latest and greatest codec from Windows Media Player in order to view it.
It's things like this that made me drop Windows Media Player altogether and switch my main media player to VLC.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[TypeC]

Consider we are not talking only desktop PCs, but low-end embedded and pornographic equipment

You got that right!

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[Fastolfe]

How does switching to another player fix the problem of not having a codec to play an AVI? VLC will have the same problem as Media Player. If VLC doesn't have the codec, it won't play the AVI just like Windows Media Player won't play it without the codec.

If your move to VLC is done to protest Microsoft file formats, Media Player supports lots of non-Microsoft movie formats.

Don't get me wrong, I use VLC at home too, but it's not clear to me how your move to VLC can be justified by echoing someone else's frustration at the AVI file format. Or is this just fanaticism? "Microsoft is evil!!! Use VLC!!!"?

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[OrangeTide]

There are many algorithms better than bzip2. By many gzip and bzip2 are considered the same compression level, because the difference is so small. bzip2 isn't going to pay off on those little 64 pixel wide thumbnails. Maybe one of those other free lossless compression algorithms would pay off though.

A format like PNG but with lossy compression would be very useful to have. JPG is nice, but it really doesn't hold much metadata. at least not metadata that is well defined.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[penp]

Because VLC handles codecs internally. It has all of the common decoders built into it so you don't have to hassle with installing a ton of different AVI codecs. Everything I have thrown at VLC plays, and I haven't had to mess with any installations other than the one to install VLC. The AVI file format frustrates me, too, and I got tired of installing codec packages bloated with spyware and proprietary codecs that nobody uses. So, I use VLC.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[TClevenger]

At least they should provide a text field that could be displayed indicating the codec used. It sucks when VLC or MPlayer indicate that a codec is needed, but can't tell you exactly which one.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[ncc74656]

Because VLC handles codecs internally. It has all of the common decoders built into it so you don't have to hassle with installing a ton of different AVI codecs.

On Windows, the better solution for codec hell is ffdshow (link is to Afterdawn instead of SourceForge because the binaries offered by SourceForge are old and busted). It integrates all of the same codecs used by VLC (and mplayer, for that matter) with DirectShow, so any player, editor, or encoder that uses DirectShow can use it. ffdshow is also recommended over all of those "codec packs" that are out there.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[Pope]

It's even worse: there are a lot of retarded Windows users out there who will rename DivX-encoded AVI files to .mpg so that it plays in a different player by default.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[adz21c]

Like you, I am a novice when it comes to this, so I may be completely wrong. From my perspective I would say the reason it can hold just about any codec is more of a "well why the hell not?" kinda of decision, lets just add some additional flexibility. From what I know the purpose of the container is to define how 2 or more streams of audio/video link together (not much point in a container if it's only one really) such as audio delays etc, which becomes useful with stuff like DVDs being able to hold more than 1 audio stream for languages with one video, which can be a space saver. So if the container is not actually handling audio/video information really, simply handling some higher level information generic to all types of audio/video streams for the media player, then why tie it to one codec type?

On an additional possibility, from a users perspective yes it would probably be easier if this was all defined by the codec, so Divx has its own container and audio codec mashed into one, this way when you get the stuff you need for divx you got it all rather than just maybe half. From a developers perspective the separation has allowed people to focus on just what it is they need to focus on (so the guys developing XviD don't need to worry about writing an audio codec or a container because these can be handled elsewhere) and when it comes to the people writing the media players they handle a few containers so they know how the data roughly looks when it comes to them then just link to a codec to process the data.

Also you can identify the codec etc I think. If you use Transcode there is a binary called tcprobe, I am sure this has identified that a container has for example a DivX or WMV codec video in it with MP3 audio or something without me having the appropriate codec. Also I am using KDE, when I right click an AVI file and go to properties then meta information i get the following information

Length
Resolution
Frame rate
Video Codec
Audio Codec

So I know exactly what codec's etc I need. Granted this may not be helpful if I download a video clip to find I don't have the codec, but like above I can find out what codec I need easily and go get it, which is really exactly what I would need to do if I it turned out I didn't have the codec required for the hypothetical DivX file format I mentioned earlier.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[BritneySP2]

A standardized plugin-based architecture for media encoders and decoders (such as DirectShow) is preferable - for more than one reason - to any kind of "liballcodecs.dll", IMHO.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[petermgreen]

Also, bzip2 is good with large amounts of information. And surprisingly PNG isn't the case: not the whole image is compressed but group of adjacent lines. That's done to allow network usage: user can see parts of image before it is completely downloaded.
totally incorrect, a png contains one long compressed stream of data (this may be split between multiple chunks to allow iterative generation but thats a minor overhead). Remember gzip is a stream compressor so you can feed it more input and get more output while keeping the compressor state intact.

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[Schrade]

For the latest versions of ffdshow use ffdshow Tryouts instead.

The original developer(s) of ffdshow let it pretty much die and now clsid and xxl are working on adding new patches and abilities.

Website is here: http://ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net/

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[aybiss]

What's really stupid is that we're still relying on three letter extensions to determine what's inside a file. If we all did away with that and the container formats (we already have multiple file streams, at least under Windows) things would be a lot cleaner.

umm patented and Proprietary a standard?

[Treates2]

hmm... i wonder if their patented, trademarked, and proprietary format will come DRM? *ponders*

PNG is no replacement for JPG

[Animaether]

PNG is a replacement for GIF, if anything. JPG files are much smaller than PNG files for typical photographs (though can be smaller for line art and the like), which will always leave JPG as the favorite much like FLAC isn't replacing MP3 anytime soon. The alpha channel in PNG is absolutely a nice perk, but thanks to the dim people at Microsoft never supporting it right until IE7, there wasn't much benefit over using GIF files. (Even though PNG did bi-level transparency just as fine as GIF files - even better, you didn't lose 1 palette entry - but that as an aside.)

If you want a JPG replacement - a la OGG Vorbis over MP3 - try JPEG2000 or the lurawave stuff based on wavelets.

Re:PNG is no replacement for JPG

[ampathee]

The alpha channel in PNG is absolutely a nice perk, but thanks to the dim people at Microsoft never supporting it right until IE7, there wasn't much benefit over using GIF files.

Except for the fact that GIF only supports 256 (256!) colours? That seems like rather a large advantage for PNG to me!

I do agree that (high-quality) JPG is better for photos though. Horses for courses, really. Lossy for photos, lossless for icons, line-art, etc.

Re:PNG is no replacement for JPG

[ElephanTS]

good reply

PNG8 (as opposed to PNG24) is really a replacement for GIF but it suffers from not being able to do frame animation. PNG8's and GIFs normally produce very similar sizes because they use very similar compression techniques. PNG24 does the alpha channel stuff but produces large files and as you say MS scuppered it by not supporting it properly until now in IE7. The only thing that should have succeeded JPEG was JPEG2000 but it doesn't look like that will ever happen (a shame I think).

Re:PNG is no replacement for JPG

[Goaway]

Even though PNG did bi-level transparency just as fine as GIF files - even better, you didn't lose 1 palette entry

Incorrect. You do lose one palette entry.

Re:PNG is no replacement for JPG

[Anonymous Coward]

As for your .sig, "god" can be replaced by any noun "x", and therefore your statement is vacuous. You'd also say it's "faith" that there's not a pink unicorn in your bedroom right now that disappears the second you poke your head in, correct? Don't be a sheep.

Re:PNG is no replacement for JPG

[ampathee]

It's a joke, AC. Woody Allen said it.

Also, I'm aware that you can't prove a negative. I would indeed say that I have 'faith' that there is no [pink unicorn|invisible dragon|FSM|God] because although their non-existence is impossible to prove, I consider them unlikely to the point where I can say I absolutely do not believe in them.

So I don't consider my .sig vacuous, and I don't see how it makes me a 'sheep'.
Thanks for not saying 'sheeple' by the way :)

Re:PNG is no replacement for JPG

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for not saying 'sheeple' by the way :)

He was referring to you specifically, so it would have to be a singular noun anyway... "sherson"?

Re:PNG is no replacement for JPG

[Anonymous Coward]

Lack of animation can be seen as a feature.

Yawn

[ameline]

Doesn't do anything tiff can't

If this is the same as the last time around, they've just taken tiff, duplicated a bunch of the baseline tags for no good reason (other than to make it incompatible), added their own codec (which they could have done to tiff very easily), removed a bunch of useful stuff from tiff, and called it their own image format. It's a real hack job.

It's just MS being the MS we've come to know and love so well -- making their own binary formats in the hopes of extending their monopoly.

Re:Yawn

[Wesley Felter]

they've just taken tiff, duplicated a bunch of the baseline tags for no good reason (other than to make it incompatible), added their own codec (which they could have done to tiff very easily), removed a bunch of useful stuff from tiff, and called it their own image format.

If you add a new codec to TIFF, then IMO it would be misleading to still call it TIFF, since existing apps that claim to read TIFF can't read the new codec.

Re:Yawn

[zippthorne]

tiff is a container format. Not all of its features are supported by all of its readers&writers.

Re:Yawn

[petermgreen]

and that is why noone but graphics proffesionals uses it.

if you want to reasonablly be able to advertise the ability to read tiff files you have to drag in a huge number of different decoder libraries just to support most tiffs and you will still have people bitching about why thier tiff opens in photoshop but not in your app.

Re:Yawn

[ameline]

That's just completely untrue.

All anyone has to do to get excellent tiff support is to use libtiff. I don't think I've ever encountered a tiff that it couldn't read. Yes, you do have to build it and your app with a bunch of codecs - boo-farkin-hoo. Takes all of a couple of days of dev time to integrate libtiff with all the available codecs into a typical app. (I know, because I've done it.)

If MS wanted this to really take off, they would have opensourced the codec and integrated it into libtiff. Game over for every other format (assuming their claims about the uber-excellence of their codec are actually true).

Re:Yawn

[Viol8]

"Takes all of a couple of days of dev time to integrate libtiff with all the available codecs into a typical app."

Oh is that all.

Jeez , I wonder what palnet some people live on , I really do...

Re:Yawn

[Viol8]

One would expect being able to decode the image to be a fundamental part of any image read/writer.

Or perhaps I'm just old fashioned...

Re:Yawn

[petermgreen]

can't say i've ever tried to work with libtiff but a quick poke at the api docs seems to indicate you have to use different interfaces depending on the underlying structure of the tiff file.

and while the dependancies aren't as bad as i thought then if you can't assume it will already be installed (which you almost certainly can't) it will still add at least a meg to the size of your app (ok ok its nothing compared to the size of some megabloat apps but its hardly insignificant either).

and then you have to find or write imports for the language you use on all platforms you use and if dynamically linking it work out how to install it on all platforms you use.

and then you have to track it for security updates and find a way of getting those to users of your app.

and this all assumes that calling custom native code is an option, in many cases (browser applets and other bytecode that runs in security limited environments) it isn't

What does it cost?

[e9th]

How does MicroSoft intend to license it?

Re:What does it cost?

[FudRucker]

the most evil way possible, but it will just render it as a windows only niche...

Re:What does it cost?

[chazard]

Microsoft will tell you to pay them to view pictures of your family.
Then they will encrypt your family with a new DRM that will result in a fee for your Mom to make you banana bread and cookies.

They will likely also have a new rev for vista that will not let you view your old jpgs until you have converted them into the new format.
They will then be deleted after 3 days or if you view them 3 times - whichever comes first.

Re:What does it cost?

[pionzypher]

Something about signing over rights to eat your wife and have sex with babies...

Er.. Something like that anyway.

Re:What does it cost?

[pilotfactory]

What does it cost? It cost you nothing*! No rates, no royalties for ten years*! That's right, ten years*!

(* = after the industry adopted it, we'll send you a tiny check and an invoice, incl. outst. interest. Usual conditions apply.)

Lousy speculative headlines

[sixteenvolt]

As Thaelon said: If your headline ends in a question mark, it's not news.

Re:Lousy speculative headlines

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot stopped being about news a long time ago. You want news? Then f*** off to Digg or something, and leave us trolls to chew on the stale dupes in peace...

Re:Lousy speculative headlines

[Anonymous Coward]

...to Digg... HAHA!

Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[cybrthng]

The moment you save them?

Some licenses are best meant to preserve the orginal work of art, not enforce the shared derivitaves thereof.

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Some licenses are best meant to preserve the orginal work of art, not enforce the shared derivitaves thereof.

Do you believe that your documentswill be subjected to MS's licensing terms when you save them in word? Of course not.

The GPL does not cover works created using GPLd tools. Learn the difference between code & content.

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[tepples]

Learn the difference between code & content. Would you please elaborate?

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[cybrthng]

Content can be licensed GPL. I see it for games to websites to different public license variants.

I'm just curious with codecs especially. I understand GPL as it is for source code but what does GPL mean if you use that license for your source and your product if that product was your own proprietary data set such as a high fidelity lossless compression archive?

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[Seumas]

Code is a microwave. Content is a burrito. General Electric may have a patent on technology used in the microwave you're nuking your burrito with, but it's still your burrito to do with as you wish.

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[mrchaotica]

Sure, the GPL FAQ explains this sort of thing:

• How does the GPL apply to fonts [which are sort-of executable]?
• Can I release a program under the GPL which I developed using non-free tools?
• Can I use GPL-covered editors such as GNU Emacs to develop non-free programs? Can I use GPL-covered tools such as GCC to compile them?
• Is there some way that I can GPL the output people get from use of my program? For example, if my program is used to develop hardware designs, can I require that these designs must be free?
• In what cases is the output of a GPL program covered by the GPL too?

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[cybrthng]

Thats not the same.

Code = Software
Codec = Process
Data = Product

If you GPL the code and GPL the codec and the Data is a mix of the Codec and Product where does the GPL stop? I'll have to look at GCC's license to see how they do the same because technically i could edit a binary and not edit the code but still be subject to the GPL correct?

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

YOU ARE SO STUPID. SHUT UP.

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[jasontheking]

does the same reasoning extend to compilers?

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

does the same reasoning extend to compilers?

Yes. For instance Apple uses the GPL'd GCC to compile all their proprietary stuff.

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[cortana]

Pray, tell us under what legal theory does that hold?

If it were true, then you would not be allowed to distribute or modify any image you created with proprietary software such as Photoshop.

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[KarmaMB84]

Only because there are exceptions in the headers. If a program embeds a sufficient part of itself in the output, the output must be GPLed if the GPLed parts aren't stripped. If they are required for the output to work, there better be an exception if you want to make it proprietary.

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[10101001 10101001]

Code = Software
Codec = Process
Data = Product

I think, in part, you're confusing patents and copyright (for example, your discussion of MP3s), and I think, in part, you're trying to extrapolate the GPL as if it were copyright law.

So, let's step back a bit and try to untangle exactly what's going on. When you use a codec, you're using a piece of software. The codec itself is protected under copyright and possibly under patents. In any event, the actions the codec carries out are not in themselves creative. By this, I mean, the transformations are deterministic with an intended output; creativity could be said to be non-deterministic (ie, originality) with an intended output. Copyright only extends to works that are the result of a creative process. To that end, nothing a codec does could itself be copyrighted; if it could be, the codec itself would be the copyright owner, not the writer of the codec; of course, such a codec would seemingly fill the requirements of a partial AI, so I think the concerns of copyright would not exactly be high on the list of discussion.

Having said all that, we get into the issue of something like the MP3 codec. The concern with it, as related to the GPL, has more to do with the GPL having provisions about patents. Patents, as you likely know, apply to a process, not a specific implementation. This, of course, can be a huge issue with something like the GPL because a large point of the GPL is to allow for the redistribution of GPLed code. If only some people were allowed to legally redistribute the code, by paying patent royalties, then the "network" of involvement to improve GPLed code would be a lot less webbed and a lot more hierarchical (or, it'd be a lot more illegal). Because of this, the GPL requires that all distributed code that implements a patent include royalty-free redistribution covering that patent. Because the MP3 code is patented and there is no royalty-free redistribution allowed (no matter what is said about trying to include an exception for open source), gpled mp3 codecs are illegal, if for no other reason than the distributor of the gpled code is granting others a privilege he doesn't have.

Having said all that, there's nothing illegal about the mp3 format or inherently legal about mp3s themselves. But given the fact that you can't include an mp3 encoder or decoder with a totally GPL software distribution, MP3s have been frowned upon in the free/open software world. On top of that, of course, is the excessive piracy of music (and note, this is further proof that codecs don't change copyright; if they did, the codec maker would be the one suing over all the CD->MP3ed music, not the RIAA and its members) in MP3 format, as it was the first to make it readily possible to share music (commercial and otherwise) over the internet that has basically made MP3 synonymous with pirated music. The last thing many in the free software world want is to have the appearance that the GPL is all about "getting free (as in beer) stuff", even if it's through illegal means.

PS - Things like the gcc include an exception about the GPL not applying as a result of using gcc to compile a program precisely to avoid confusion over the issue; this is somewhat humorous as there are many places were a transformation application of one sort or another will copy small fragments of itself into the destination application, which you seem to recognize. The one overriding principle to always remember is that copyright applies first. The GPL is subordinate to the rules of copyright. So is every other, proprietary license. Now, if you wanted something with more fuzzy lines, one could discuss the linking of libraries. But, that's a whole other discussion.

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you want you images subject to Microsoft Licensing the moment you save them? What if Microsoft "upgrades" their "standard" and your 5-10 year old digital photo's can't be viewed anymore (like with older Word documents, but with images it will be worse)?

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[Brandybuck]

Because a FAQ is better than talking with your lawyer...

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[Hal_Porter]

I like the way they worry about inaccurate translations, like Muslims do with the Qu'ran. The GPL really is a revealed text, not a composed one isn't it?

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[Macthorpe]

Can you cite an example where Microsoft has updated a standard and now the old standard can no longer be read? I assume you're talking of some magical image or document format that somehow erases itself when a standard updates?

There's plugins for OO.o that still read Word 1.0 files. Files don't just disappear because the format is no longer supported by it's maker.

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[SnowZero]

No, but it's a hell of a lot better than asking Slashdot.

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

So, let's step back a bit and try to untangle exactly what's going on. When you use a codec, you're using a piece of software. The codec itself is protected under copyright and possibly under patents. In any event, the actions the codec carries out are not in themselves creative. By this, I mean, the transformations are deterministic with an intended output; creativity could be said to be non-deterministic (ie, originality) with an intended output. Copyright only extends to works that are the result of a creative process. To that end, nothing a codec does could itself be copyrighted; if it could be, the codec itself would be the copyright owner, not the writer of the codec; of course, such a codec would seemingly fill the requirements of a partial AI, so I think the concerns of copyright would not exactly be high on the list of discussion. This can be stated more precisely: when you "create" something digitally, you make a string of bits using encoder, and these bits have no meaning on their own without the appropriate decoder. So encoder/decoder is the part of what is usually called "creative process" in a fundamentally different way than when you "create" non-digital work because with encoder/decoder you enter right from the start into the issue of patents and licenses, even before you can claim your copyright.

Good example is photography: In the analog photography you use patented equipment and processes all the time: cameras, lenses, film, paper, chemicals, etc. and at the end here comes out your beautiful photo that you can copyright, reproduce (digitally or not) and so on.
In the digital photography you take the photo using your digital camera, but at that point you have not produced any object yet, just some binary representation of the photo. You might not even be able to see that photo ever unless you agree to terms of the license agreement of the encoder, period.

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason for the GPL exception in GCC is that GCC actually does (or, at least, may) include code of its own in the resulting binary - floating-point emulation is probably a good example. So it's not just to avoid confusion; there really is a legal reason why this exception is needed.

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[Dog-Cow]

"You might not even be able to see that photo ever unless you agree to terms of the license agreement of the encoder, period."

Any such limitations would be technical and not legal. When you take a photo using any type of camera, that photo is yours, no matter what form it is in. (Assuming no complications such as the storage medium or camera belonging to someone else.) Even if the photo is encoded using a patented algorithm, the content (even the encoded bits) are yours to do as you please.

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

Content can be licensed GPL.

No, it can't. You are stupid. You are thinking of Copyright, or Creative Commons or some other form of content license or protection. You've got a million monkeys typing on keyboards telling you this. Why can't you get it through your head that GPL does not apply to content?

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

Any such limitations would be technical and not legal. When you take a photo using any type of camera, that photo is yours, no matter what form it is in. (Assuming no complications such as the storage medium or camera belonging to someone else.) Even if the photo is encoded using a patented algorithm, the content (even the encoded bits) are yours to do as you please. While I agree, more or less, with you that there is a clear distinction between technical and legal aspects in this case, what is very curious to me is this very possibility that I can own, copyright and do whatever I want with the particular binary representation of the photo except see it, without implicitly/explicitly agreeing with the particular license and/or paying for the patent.

Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[Reziac]

In what cases is the output of a GPL program covered by the GPL too?
Only when the program copies part of itself into the output.

That's a minefield all by itself. Say the program generates something with data fields, and it labels those data fields by copying $FOO from a list of labels defined within the program. Technically, the output now includes "part" of the program.

That may not be the intent (presumably the *intent* was to cover snippets of *source code* that a program copies into the output) but I can see how a wicked lawyer could have a field day with this.

Exactly...

[plasmacutter]

this is the same story with windows media..

the lesson is: the looser the licensing terms (while still maintaining an actual standard), the more widely used it will be.

this means microsft, sony, and real can keep scrambling to their hearts content, but they wont touch a majority share when they treat formats like this.

Re:Exactly...

[Goaway]

It also means formats with only GPL'd implementations don't take off either. Like DjVu.

Re:Exactly...

[plasmacutter]

well.. that has more to do with the decentralized nature of how most gpl'd standards arise.

there are no centralized "official" bodies for proprietary houses to contact for most widespread gpl formats because there are always multiple and slightly divergent implementations.

matroska is the best example i can produce for this..

sure it was conceived and has a "standard", but there are several implementations for the packagers and decoders... some of which are not compatible with one another... and there is no real way to label one or the other as the authoritative "official" version.

the non-media related example would be the million and one flavors of linux.. several of which wont take builds made for the other.. it makes it hard to make an official "linux installer" for say.. a popular video game.

this is something which will need to be overcome in order to pave the way to transition to average desktop use.

Re:Exactly...

[Anonymous Coward]

. . . And that's why apple's AAC (mp4) codec is the only audio codec that is actually making a dent on the .mp3 stranglehold.

GPL doesn't extend to user data

[MichaelSmith]

It applies to the code

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[ceoyoyo]

No. Documents you create with OO.org aren't all GPLed either. The GPL specifically applies to code. You own the copyright to anything you create, even if you use someone else's program to do it. Now, if you use someone else's work and modify it, such as modifying a GPLed program, THEN you have to abide by their copyright wishes.

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[mrchaotica]

In a sense its like compiling a program, when its compiled it isn't code, its executable data.

FYI, GNU software that does stuff like that (e.g. GNU Bison, which is the GNU implementation of yacc) has an exception so that the problem you mention does not apply.

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[cybrthng]

ahh good find.

Seriously, i hadn't thought about GPL being applied to a "process" in a way such a codec, always thought of it form the source side. A codec is a we bit different since its basically creating something on the fly and if the GPL can apply to a process to keep that process free/unpatented wouldn't anything you apply that process to be subject to the license as a derivative work?

going out on a limb i'm sure :)

strange one would exclude open source licensing as that even excludes software on the microsoft side of the fence unless that is meant to protect the codec and the resulting data from derivative work type licensing issues to begin with.

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[Jherek Carnelian]

But isnt that the "grey area" that MP3 Patent lawsuits are brought upon? MP3's aren't the data, its the codec. If the actual "bits" as written by the licensed software is part of the logic of the program couldn't someone say that by using a GPL program to make images based off a GPL codec in a GPL format would have to be GPL'd?

Huh?

The MP3 patent lawsuits are based on a claim of software patents for the encoding and decoding of data. Not on the end results of either operation.

Nobody, or at least nobody of any standing, has tried to claim that Fraunhoffer's software patents on MP3 mean that they can assert any sort of ownership or control over files that contain MP3-encoded data.

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[fabs64]

Basically it seems you've got 'patents' and 'copyright' confused.. not surprising really, it's a morass.
The GPL is just copyright, it applies to the specific thing you created, if you were to come up with some amazing new compression algorithm and release the code under the GPL, without patenting it, that algorithm could be re-implemented with different code by anyone and they would not have to release their code under the GPL.
The reason for a program like Bison having the output GPL'd, is that Bison actually creates lots of the output using its own code, ie, the Bison output HAS GPL code in it. Fortunately there's the exception which makes this a non-issue.

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[Iron Condor]

In a sense its like compiling a program, when its compiled it isn't code, its executable data.

Beginning programmers realize that data can be code.

Expert programmers realize that all code is data.

Master programmers understand that all data is code.

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[FLEB]

For most applications, I think you could run afoul of patent law by unauthorized use of the patented process. There's a small case, illustrated by Macromedia's (overzealous, IMO) licensing for Director standalones, when elements created solely by the program's creator are bundled verbatim with user-published work as a matter of course.

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[amRadioHed]

Nice! That sounds like it should be in "The Tao of Programming".

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[644bd346996]

But the reason that bison includes the exception is that its output contains an non-trivial portion of bison's own code (which is what is covered by the gpl). If bison's output did not include part of bison's code, the exception would not be necessary.

The exception is lacking from gcc because the compiler's output does not contain part of the compiler. Any other program that simply processes data is also safe from this issue. It is only when the output contains gpl'd code/data that such a stipulation is necessary.

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[udippel]

Call me a licencing nazi, but OO.org is not GPL-ed.

Just FYI: It uses The Lesser GPL (LGPL); so that derivative work could restrict some users' freedom.
For the rest, your answer is fine. The suspicion of creative work automatically licenced under the code of the software is simply preposterous.
[Waiting for Microsoft to invent this new twist: A copy of your MS-Office documents are auto-sent-to Redmond and from then onwards, you will have to pay for the use of your own documents. Sorry, even for the fair use of your own documents.]

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[arodland]

But isnt that the "grey area" that MP3 Patent lawsuits are brought upon?

No... MP3 patents are about, you know, patents. Copyrights are not patents. Patents are not copyrights.

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[SnowZero]

You forgot:
LISP programmers didn't even realize there was a difference.

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

The reason for a program like Bison having the output GPL'd, is that Bison actually creates lots of the output using its own code, ie, the Bison output HAS GPL code in it. Fortunately there's the exception which makes this a non-issue. I don't quite understand this part: are in the generated source code for the parser some parts under GPL, and some not? Does "using [Bison's] own code" refer to some fixed pieces of the output that are part of the parser, or do they also change depending on the input to the Bison?

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[Ilgaz]

Lets say you use Linux or OS X,if you can't view a photo your HD Photo using windows friend sent you without dozen of unsupported hacks, it is naturally extended to you as user.

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[mrchaotica]

Quite right; thank you for clarifying.

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[mgiuca]

It applies to the code

But patents extend to user data. HD Photo is heavily patented. The wiki says basically, "it's patented, but MS promises not to sue anybody who uses it but doesn't put it under the GPL."

itsatrap.

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[Anonymous Coward]

...so that derivative work could restrict some users' freedom.

To be complete the LGPL (which OO.org is indeed using) allows the linking to/from commercial, closed-source, software but also allows to "convert" to a 100% GPL codebase. Which may be seen as "enhancing" or "restricting" some users' freedom, depending on one's point of view. It has been done with NeoOffice, which is GPL and which the OO.org can NOT take code from for the native Mac port (I've seen an alpha running, go OO.org, go!).

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[fabs64]

I'm sorry, that was a terribly unclear explanation. Bison parses a text file and generates C given the rules you give it, but the C it generates has to contain some sort of code written by the peoeple who wrote Bison to follow the rules you gave it.
Once again that was unclear... gah. basically, Bison parses text, according to your rules, and outputs C. However if you think about it, at least some (most) of that C has to be pre-written before it can be generated like that, hence, the original C is technically under the GPL, and technically being copied to your output.

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[ceoyoyo]

Yeah, it was the first example of an open source project that creates data files that came to mind. A bad one, as you point out.

Microsoft has experimented with pay-per-use software before, and they'll probably have to respond to Google's online suite with one of their own. If they have a proprietary data format you're effectively locked into a system where you have to pay to access your own document, not for any legal reason, but simply because that's the only way to do it. They don't own the copyright for the document itself, but they do own (either as a trade secret or a patent) the means to read it.

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

Thanx for the explanation!

Microsoft influence is waning

[jellomizer]

I doubt that Microsoft will make any headway in this. MS is becoming less and less trusted, and if there is a good alternative that already exists and is supported everywhere it will stick. JPG, GIF, RAW, will stay there. MS, is getting more and more pathetic trying to regain there loosing glory of the 1990's. They have been able to get some marginal headway on SQL servers, and some other software. But for data format standards they haven't gotten a good stronghold on a document foothold From office formats.

Re:Microsoft influence is waning

[westlake]

I doubt that Microsoft will make any headway in this. MS is becoming less and less trusted

"Trust" as used here matters only to the geek. What matters to the professional photographer is support in hardware and in Photoshop - and HD Photo is halfway there.

better example

[twitter]

I predict it will succeed in displacing jpg just like png displaced both gif and jpg.

Or WMA replaced MP3. png did replace gif with good reason and could take the place of jpeg without much cost to device makers. M$ pushed WMA as hard as they could, making it the default format for WMP, shoving it down the throats of device makers while forbiding them to use ogg, but WMA still flopped. It flopped because it sucked. They said it was better but it was not and everyone ignored them.

Re:better example

[dedazo]

png did replace gif with good reason

Really? And where exactly did you get that from?

Re:better example

[arth1]

(PNG having taken over for GIF)

Really? And where exactly did you get that from?

Well, this very web page you're staring at is a good example.
I count 21 PNG files and 2 GIF files.

Re:better example

[petermgreen]

but there are still people who belive that png has poor browser support or that it is larger than gif (the fault of bad image editing tools that don't provide a clear enough seperation between changing color depth and changing format and of bad png endoders in adobe photoshop)

yes png has slowly crept onto the web but even with reasonablly tech savy people like web designers it has taken a LONG time to get acceptance.

Re:better example

[dedazo]

I love that someone modded you up. Nothing personal, mind you.

Would you like to run your test on a couple more million websites (say 10 million? Nice, round number) and get back to me?

Re:better example

[arth1]

According to some calamaris reports from a couple of busy proxy servers, the current ratio of GIF to PNG is about 2.6:1. If it wasn't for the myriad of GIF web bugs and 1x1 43-byte shims (which honestly don't need to be converted to PNG), this would be slightly in favour of PNG.
For new sites, PNG most certainly is the winner, but old unmaintained sites with GIFs will still stay with us for years or decades.

Regards,
--
*Art

If JPEG can't microsoft can't

[John.P.Jones]

If JPEG can't develop a standard to effectively replace JPEG (JPEG2000) then I really don't see much hope for Microsoft in doing so.

Re:If JPEG can't microsoft can't

[Alioth]

The difference between the JPEG group and Microsoft is that the JPEG group doesn't have a desktop OS monopoly to push their file formats. All Microsoft has to do is make their new format the default format for all the Windows built in tools, and sure enough - it won't be long until they own that defacto standard too.

It's already happened pretty much for video. Any random video I get sent by people is almost always in WMV9 format, because Microsoft made their proprietary format the default in Windows.

RAW?

[Animaether]

"Everyone dissatisfied with JPG is already using RAW"?

I don't know where you're getting that statement from. Everybody dissatisfied with JPG - which I can only imagine stems from the fact that it is lossy compression - is either using:
PNG - because it's common, free to use, etc. etc.
EXR - because it'll allow you to store whatever the hell you want
GIF - because it's ubiquitious and is free to use nowadays (not that too many people cared a few years ago)

'RAW' isn't used by anybody. 'RAW' does not exist. 'RAW' is a collective name for a shitload of formats by a smaller shitload of digital camera companies. And it is never "RAW".. it is never raw data.. it's compressed, stored integratedly or separately, encrypted or not (SONY, among other) and contains a bunch of camera data. The closest thing to a "RAW" format is, say, PFM (portable/pixel float map) or any other format that just stores every color(group) as a bunch of bytes in a long chunk with minimal to zero header/footer information whatsoever that you can only open if you know things like bitdepth and dimension. The closest thing to a unified 'RAW' format for cameras is Adobe's DNG (Digital Negative) - and that's finding slow (no?) adoption as it is. And the closest thing to a unified non-'RAW' format for cameras that isn't lossy compressed is TIFF. None of which you can toss on a website and make viewable in any of the major browsers without plugin installation (if even available!)

That said, I agree with all your other points, especially point 1. Microsoft should be kicked even when down for jumping on the HD bandwagon with a product (or format) that has nothing whatsoever to do with HD.

Re:RAW?

[Goaway]

The raw format of cameras is far more "raw" than PFM or any other RGB format. Camera raw formats save the actual output from the image sensor, before applying the numerous algorithms needed to massage the data into RGB form. The point of camera raw data is not just to avoid compression, it is to do the highly complex processing needed at a later stage, and allow for finer control over the resulting output.

Re:RAW?

[Animaether]

That doesn't make it "RAW".. What you are referring to is storing the image sensor data, rather than the demosaic'd Bayer (or whatever) pattern. True enough - but they're still not storing that in a "RAW" format. A "RAW" format might be (say it stores it as 8 bytes *ick*)
RGBGRGBGRGBGRGBG
GRGBGRGBGRGBGRGB

etc. stored as just a bunch of bytes - and sans the linebreak. Then it's "RAW", so you can read it out with whatever can parse a binary, without having to resort to looking up how that data is stored, how to get it out, decrypting it (SONY), etc.

Don't confuse RAW storage with RAW information, if you will :)

Re:RAW?

[Spudtrooper]

Microsoft should be kicked even when down for jumping on the HD bandwagon with a product (or format) that has nothing whatsoever to do with HD. HD Radio 4 life!

Re:RAW?

[bendodge]

'RAW' isn't used by anybody. I have a friend digital in photography, and he uses RAW. He is somebody, therefore, somebody uses RAW, therefore, you are wrong.

'RAW' is a collective name for a ****load of formats by a smaller ****load of digital camera companies. Just because it is a group doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

(Some of his neat pics, if you like photography:)
http://www.erality.com/content/00576/
http://www.erality.com/content/00576/

Re:RAW?

[Niebieski]

The point of camera raw data is not just to avoid compression, it is to do the highly complex processing needed at a later stage, and allow for finer control over the resulting output.

And let's not forget storing the data in (usually) 12 bits per pixel instead of 8, which you can later use to salvage details (mostly highlights) that would otherwise be lost to in-camera processing.

Agreed, your statement was more general in nature, but an example doesn't hurt.

Re:RAW?

[ConceptJunkie]

Oh yes, GIF is making a roaring comeback for all those 320x200 pinups of Cheryl Tiegs and Lynda Carter stored on single-sided 5-1/4 inch "flippy disks" made with a hole-puncher.

I even knew a guy who has a copy of that awesome "Lena" picture in 16 whole colors! Man that was cool!

Re:RAW?

[defstro]

It's been mentioned in a previous post, but don't forget .tiff, and unless you are talking about web content, I can't imagine using the .gif format.

Re:RAW?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because it is a group doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

No, but it does mean that it isn't used. You either use one format or the other, you don't create a file in a group of formats. How would you do that in the first place? First byte is Canon raw, second byte is Sony raw, third byte is Minolta raw...?

Re:RAW?

[Goaway]

No, you're thinking one single use of the word "raw" out of many is the only official one. It is not. There is no specific definition of the word "raw" that means what you are talking about. It is sometimes used in that sense, and sometimes in other senses.

Re:RAW?

[bendodge]

The RAW formats all have the same overall properties, so it is safe to refer to them in general.

I think they should call it:

[callmetheraven]

displays for sure!

wont change a thing...

[thekm]

there are plenty of formats out there that are better than JPEG, and yet only the popular will continue to live on.

There used to be a direct JPEG competitor (wave based raster compression) called 'Lightning Strike' or something... you could actually control the level of compression by an alpha channel. That way, like a portrait, you could keep the face in sharp detail without loss, and the rest will be compressed to heck leaving a file size and compression truly in the hands of the person making the file.

But it's not even about file size... in many instances, if you want a lossless image just the plain 'PSD' photoshop is by far the best. Many times I've had to send large images for adverts, and just used the flat PSD image as it was the smallest file size and obviously no loss in quality.


The image format war is just about popularity... which is why Gif has lasted through everything even though PNG is just as good and more open. New image formats will actually have to do something new for them to gain any traction at all... a pervasive vector and raster combination image should have been available by now and renderable in browsers. There's EPS, but we need browsers to support these things if they're going to get anywhere for the web... anything else but end users saying "fantastic, I really need to get that" just wont have a hope.

...actually flash could probably be the good combo format, but it's hard to get designers to output flash that doesn't have some form of retarded movement in it.


And while it's kind of on the topic, something like MetaStream should have been pervasive by now... along with LightningStrike, there's another "should have been awesome" product. *sigh*



But with JPEG being everywhere, the JVM's, the server solutions, the just-about-freaking-everything... there is no way MS can even think of threatening JPEG. It's just absurd to think they can.

Re:wont change a thing...

[raynet]

You could probably use alpha channel information to select how much each block in the JPEG is compressed.

I've been using Ulead Smartsaver Pro for years now and it allows me to specify either colors or select areas and then choose how much that area gets emphasized, like using 80% of the filesize for the face and 20% for the rest of the image. Very handy when building websites and the AD really wants to put a 1000x1000 pixel image on the frontpage and you try to make it load as fast as possible and still look good.

Sometimes I also make GIFs with 512 or 1024 colors as they can be much smaller than truecolor PNGs.

No

[istartedi]

No. Next!

Rationale? We already have JPEG for lossy and PNG for lossless and now that GIF is off-patent we have that too. All of these have un-encumbered implementations. Having lossless and lossy in one format doesn't really offer much of an advantage. Unless this new image format gives me time-traveling X-ray vision into whatever the picture is, why should I care? Extra compression is nice, and it might be worthwhile if you were archiving terabytes of image data. Most web sites are not, so even if it has better compression it's still not worth the hassle of switching. Bandwidth and storage are just not that expensive. In other words, it would have to totally blow away the existing formats by some performance metric. I have a hard time believing the ammount of effort to switch things over could be justified. What could possibly be that much better about any new image format? Anyone remember JPEG 2000? The wavelet compression was really interesting, but it was proprietary, somebody was trying to make money off it, and so nobody cared. It's tough to enter a market where the price is already set at ZERO. The existing product in such a market has to be inferior enough so that people are willing to pony up the extra bills. An example of where this has happened in the recent past is the compiler market. People were willing to pay extra for the Intel compiler even though GCC is free, because the Intel compiler generated faster code. It's been a while since I've looked into that, so I don't know if that's still the situation. Even with the performance difference, many people still just stuck with GCC rather than pay more. This is not MS-bashing. It's just basic economics.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone remember JPEG 2000? The wavelet compression was really interesting, but it was proprietary, somebody was trying to make money off it, and so nobody cared.

No, it's not that "somebody" was definitely trying to make money off it... the problem is actually that there's a concern that some unknown or obscure patent troll may be lying in wait with a submarine patent or two.

Re:No

[istartedi]

Yep, that's the problem I was talking about. Thanks for clarifying it.

Re:No

[warpedrive]

Well, definitely wrong on one point - JPEG-2000 does not have any patent or IP encumberances, and it's a free open standard. Try looking up the free open source implementations such Jasper, JJ, etc. All the members of the JP2K committe had to sign releases - Just so that there would be no such issues in JP2K as there were in MP3, etc.

The wavelet transform is NOT proprietary nd no one is trying to make money off it.. It's included free in Quicktime, you can download free browser plug-ins from Lurawave and Morgan Multimedia, and, if you want, you can use the library from the guy who was the primary influence in the standard, Kakadu - which is what most of the commercial products in the space are using. It's included in Photoshop as well..

JPEG-2000 is being used in Digital Cinema as the standard for movie theaters, it is widely adopted in security and surveillance, it was just adopted for use in UWB for HDMI / DVI. It is the defacto standardin satellite imaging - it's ued in Google maps, and Google Earth. The standard isn't forgotten, it's just really gaining traction now with the rise of hi-res imagery.

Check it out!

Re:No

[poot_rootbeer]

now that GIF is off-patent we have that too

We have it, but there's no reason to use it.

It's ridiculous to be dithering your graphics down to a 256-color palette in 2007. The limit on color depth made sense when the format was developed, TWENTY YEARS AGO, but now that IE7 supports PNG alpha transparency and we have Flash for animation, GIF is an obsolete format.

Re:No

[istartedi]

I beg to differ. I'd much rather embed animted GIF in something than Flash. The latter has many more capabilities; but with that comes a larger footprint and more security and compatability issues to consider. If you understand the limitations of GIF, there are actually not that many cases where you need PNG. Most non-lossy images are line art or cartoons. It's very rare that you come close to exhausting the 256 color palette. Even the Sunday version of Dilbert, for example, with full color, looks great as GIF. Most lossy images are photo-real, so you just use JPEG. Don't get me wrong. I love PNG, and you can get better compression than GIF. It's just that most of the time you don't really need PNG's non-lossy true color capabilities. GIF is so entrenched, there are so many legacy images, it's so widely implemented, it's here to stay. See my .sig also.

It's not the format, stupid. It's the license.

[Shayde]

In reality, this doesn't mean anything, because there's insufficient information in the linked article.

Microsoft, just like any other vendor on the planet, is free to submit anything they like into standards bodies, and ask that they be accepted or considered for use in the world. If Microsoft's new format is useful, fantastic, we all should start using it.

But if, and only if, that format comes free from the burden of licensing or copyright. We've seen how damaging these restrictions can be to simple file format (remember ARC? And all the fun that went on with GIF?) - If Microsoft is releasing an idea for folks to use and adopt? Excellent. If they're pushing an internal format that they hold a patent on, and are requesting other vendors to adopt it? Then it's simply Microsoft once again trying to dick over the industry. And I can't see how it can possibly work under those circumstances.

They don't have the big stick they used to. This is no longer 2000, where the corporate juggernaut simply needed to wave it's financial might and the net doth tremble before it. Microsoft has to tread carefully on an increasingly powerful free software world.

We'll see how this goes. Me, I'm waiting to hear more information.

jpeg replacements

[jbengt]

jpeg2000 was supposed to replace jpg.

MS claims that this is better quality/higher compression than jpeg, but that's only true if you don't consider jpeg2000 as jpeg.

Re:jpeg replacements

[lindseyp]

Exactly. JP2000 was lossless, was it not?

What happened to that format, anyway? I was expecting it to be ubiquitous by now.

Re:jpeg replacements

[maxume]

Patent 'discomfort' and giant disks. It is lossy, but not nearly as lossy as jpeg, so the size/quality compromise is better.

Re:jpeg replacements

[cortana]

Patents.

Re:jpeg replacements

[Lord Crc]

Exactly. JP2000 was lossless, was it not?

JPEG 2000 supports lossless compression, yes.

What happened to that format, anyway? I was expecting it to be ubiquitous by now.

My guess is patents. And the fact that it only took a few years for bandwidth and storage to negate many of the advantages of jpeg2000 over the plain jpeg standard.

Re:jpeg replacements

[gutnor]

JP2000 was not lossless. It was just giving beter quality than JPEG at the same size ( think MPEG2 -> H.264 ).
However JPEG 2000 is a pain to compress and render and is not a 'free format'. (also try to encode/render JPEG2000 images: unless you have a new Intel QuadCore you will feel the suffering of your machine. )

With this HD Format, Microsoft says their algorithm comes close to JPEG2000 quality/size but with a very simple algo.
Also Microsoft is making a lot of effort to standardise their stuff ( they tried first to license it for free, now they go to a standardisation process ). They also have the support of Adobe, which is not a bad thing when talking about image format.

A strong point for HD-Format is that it covers the quality and feature range from JPEG-2000 to TIFF-Losless. So camera manufacturer could benefit from unified chipset that works from pocket camera to SLR. Or a flexible SLR chipset that cover the whole range of quality the user wishes.

But anyway, good source of information as usual: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_graphic s_file_formats

Re:jpeg replacements

[Anonymous Coward]

JPEG 2000 does support a lossless mode. If you read the wikipedia link you posted you can see it's mentioned.

Re:jpeg replacements

[gutnor]

Yes indeed, stupidely worked from memory for JPEG2000.

Re:jpeg replacements

[Salsaman]

Also Microsoft is making a lot of effort to standardise their stuff ( they tried first to license it for free, now they go to a standardisation process ).

But it's not free. The very source you gave says: Distribution Restrictions. You may not ... modify or distribute the source code of any Distributable Code so that any part of it becomes subject to an Excluded License. An Excluded License is one that requires, as a condition of use, modification or distribution, that the code be disclosed or distributed in source code form; or others have the right to modify it.

"loosing"?

[plasmacutter]

please dont take this personally, i just feel, after seeing the word "lose" misspelled so many times, to make this post asking people to please learn how to spell lose..

"loose" is an adjective defined as "not firmly tied or held together" or "not properly tightened".

"lose" is a verb defined as "to be deprived of or cease to have or retain (something)".

it's just driven me up the wall having seen it so many times.

Re:"loosing"?

[UnknownSoldier]

loosen up already, most people don't care about grammar (or spelling) nazis who are that anal pedantic over an inconsistent language...

Re:"loosing"?

[plasmacutter]

i see.. maybe we should simply allow widespred practices like this to erode our language into a cesspool of illiteracy?

when people cite incorrect figures, spew racist invective, or start spouting off about "intelligent design" the more erudite among us tend to make sure theyre corrected, but apparently spelling is exempt.

im not responding to this as a single event, or as an attack to the original point. I've just seen this misspelling used so many times it's beginning to make me wonder if we're devolving as a species.

Re:"loosing"?

[maxume]

It's common among people that speak English as a second language, where it makes a little bit of sense. Anybody that only speaks English and does it is indeed loose with their usage.

Re:"loosing"?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's "widespread", not "widespred."

Also, look into using the caps key for the beginning of your paragraphs.

Re:"loosing"?

[Waffle Iron]

It is a kind of ironic that your brief rant on poor language usage contains 9 obvious grammatical mistakes.

Re:"loosing"?

[plasmacutter]

but i wasn't talking about grammar. I was talking about a recurring misspelling of a single word.

(additionally, unlike spelling, grammar is continuously in flux)

Re:"loosing"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you don't get to pick and choose. It's either correct, or it isn't. No grammar "flux" currently allows for sentences to start with lower-case letters.

Also, lower case 'i' is a spelling mistake, as is 'im', a two-period ellipsis, 'widespred' and 'theyre'. But as you said: " the more erudite among us tend to make sure theyre corrected, but apparently spelling [and all other grammar] is exempt."

Re:"loosing"?

[plasmacutter]

punctuation errors are forgivable.

i also overlook people who think theyre "ganksta rappahs" and people who "7yp3 i|\| 1337" on the internet.

but this particular misspelling results in a completely different word, and what's worse, an adjective used as a verb!

if i had even one penny for every time i've seen this i would be richer than bill gates.

Re:"loosing"?

[tehdaemon]

i see.. maybe we should simply allow widespred practices like this to erode our language into a cesspool of illiteracy?

You are obviously not a linguist. Linguists study just this sort of thing. It turns out that just these sort of 'widespread practices' go on all the time in languages. They do not destroy languages. They create new ones, and extend old ones.

Your fear of 'a cesspool of illiteracy' is completely unfounded. It will not happen. You can stop the grammar nazi posts now.

T

Re:"loosing"?

[Macthorpe]

punctuation errors are forgivable

No, they aren't. Punctuation is absolutely essential to sentence flow and structure. To steal an example from the internet:

Hide the cows outside.
Hide! The cow's outside.
Hide, the cow's outside.

Three sentences, three different meanings, and the only difference is punctuation. To say you're against the erosion of the English language and then claim that punctuation isn't important enough to worry about is just plain moronic.

Re:"loosing"?

[plasmacutter]

yeah, except none of my punctuation errors do that, and it's not something habitually used across multiple posters.

Re:"loosing"?

[plasmacutter]

one language diverging into 2 or 3 is not really a good thing for society in general, since impediment to communication hinders societal and technological advancement.

additionally, throughout history divergence of languages has been characteristic of the absence of civilization (it happens after empires fall, when the world becomes dominated by warlords and chaos reigns)

Re:"loosing"?

[Macthorpe]

Ah, I see now. Your punctuation and spelling errors are absolutely fine: it's other people's that are the problem with the English language nowadays.

My mistake.

Re:"loosing"?

[Teun]

It's fine with me when someone corrects a nasty spelling error, the one you just addressed is worthy of it.

But the way you write you just made a complete ass of yourself!

Re:"loosing"?

[Anonymous Coward]

oh, leave him alone. he didn't even mock you for spelling "widespread" wrong.

Re:hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

the pencil should be fine, but watch out, those other three just can't seem to get along with each other.

'HD Photo' blog

[Animaether]

For more information on 'HD Photo' (damn I hate that name), check the blog at:
http://blogs.msdn.com/billcrow/

Hasn't been updated in a good while, but contains plenty of nice information. The various bitdepth storages alone make it an 'interesting' format if nothing else - though I'm sticking with EXR.. just a shame that doesn't offer lossy compression much yet - but then.. that's not its' purpose.

Re:'HD Photo' blog

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting blog. But if he reads this:

1 - If details of a picture matter, please make it so when we click on a picture, it actually shows a zoomed version of the picture, not the same thing again.

2 - Must there be an insult to Lena? (the title of the section)

Um, no.

[retro128]

Yeah right. When was the last time a proprietary Microsoft format overtook a reigning defacto standard? I also didn't see anything in the article that indicated technology licensing fees. Given that it's Microsoft, I'm pretty sure they're going to charge for it. If they don't, they will once enough people start adopt it. After all, this is Microsoft we're talking about, guys.

Actually, never mind Microsoft. Let's look at the audio arena. The royalty-free OGG format should have bumped off MPG, but still device manufacturers are all too happy to pay Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft to use MP3. In fact, it's still hard to find devices that support OGG at all. The moral of the story is that it's really hard to get anyone to commit development costs to support a new standard, let alone beat out one that's widely supported, even if you are giving away the tech for free.

Re:Um, no.

[lindseyp]

>Yeah right. When was the last time a proprietary Microsoft format overtook a reigning defacto standard? .XLS .DOC

Hell, even .WMA is enjoying quite some success.

Re:Um, no.

[Anonymous Coward]

uhh... windows overtaking unix? lolz

Re:Um, no.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah right. When was the last time a proprietary Microsoft format overtook a reigning defacto standard?

.wmv, anybody? Didn't M$ come up with .avi too?

Re:Um, no.

[stewbacca]

I think the last time Microsoft bumped off a reigning format was in the early 90s when Excel bumped off (Lotus?)1-2-3. Even that was only a teniuous reign by 1-2-3. And even then, it was only because the early Mac versions of Excel (pre-windows 95) actually kind of worked and looked the same as it does now.

Re:Um, no.

[ibm1130]

"Actually, never mind Microsoft. Let's look at the audio arena. The royalty-free OGG format should have bumped off MPG, but still device manufacturers are all too happy to pay Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft to use MP3. In fact, it's still hard to find devices that support OGG at all. The moral of"

          And they may yet rue the day they caved to Fraunhofer as another predator has staked
          a territorial claim in that environment.

          IBM

HD photo...

[Brad1138]

The first thing I think of when I see "HD photo" is 16x9. With most things video and digital moving to widescreen, I wonder when cameras will change to widescreen as their standard picture format.

Re:HD photo...

[HappyEngineer]

I don't know how widespread it is, but my Canon Digital Rebel takes pictures with a 3:2 aspect ratio, so it's wider than 16x9.

Re:HD photo...

[Anonymous Coward]

No it's not. 3:2 is 1.5:1. 16:9 is 1.78:1.

But that's OK. 3:2 is a better ratio for most still photography.

(And the movie you see in the theatre is 1.85:1 if your in the US and 1.66:1 if you are in Europe. Unless it's 2.39:1. And your old TV is 1.33:1, and really old films are 1.37:1.)

Re:But ODF format isn't GPL

[creysoft]

No.

Yeh sure it is, God told me from above.

[liftphreaker]

Yes sure it's gonna replace JPEG. I think heard a colossally humongous cloud of oinks from up above.

The very fact that it is from mirco$haft, and they hold patents on it, and they strictly control how it is licensed, itself is a huge nail in the coffin. Now if they'd simply published the spec as an open standard and allowed anyone to use it without restrictions, then we'd have a different story.

Personally I'd be very glad if this falls flat on its silly HD face. We already have JPEG2000, maybe it's time to take another look at it, or improve it. This is not the time for yet another proprietary 'new' "standard".

as long as they donate any patents

[Kanasta]

so that we don't get a repeat of the GIF, JPEG, MP3 patent scams coming up again in the future

Re:as long as they donate any patents

[KwKSilver]

MS give away patents? Are you kidding!? WTF are you smoking?

Re:as long as they donate any patents

[Kanasta]

MS has given away things to open source, eg WiX, etc
it is also the only way this will ever float given how well JPEG2000 has been accepted...

Badly Written Article

[austior]

From the article:

The format can also accommodate "lossless" and "lossy" compression, two methods of compressing photo data with different effects on image quality. The journalist clearly doesn't know what he's talking about. Lossless compression doesn't effect image quality at all.

Re:Badly Written Article

[Anonymous Coward]

The journalist clearly doesn't know what he's talking about. Lossless compression doesn't effect image quality at all.

Nice nitpicking. Are you an ass by birth or did you learn it on Slashdot?

Re:Badly Written Article

[jorghis]

He knows exactly what he is talking about. The format will support both lossless and lossy compression as he said. The different methods have different effects on image quality. One degrades it some the other does not. Seems like a good laymans explanation to me.

Re:Badly Written Article

[bartron]

The journalist clearly doesn't know what he's talking about. Lossless compression doesn't effect image quality at all.

But the quality is different from lossless...so what part of the sentence didn't make sense to you? One has 0 effect on quality...the other degrades quality. Zero effect is still an effect.

Re:Badly Written Article

[poopdeville]

Of course it doesn't. Garbage in, garbage out.

from m-w.com:

effect
Function:
transitive verb
Date:
1533
1: to cause to come into being
2 a: to bring about often by surmounting obstacles : accomplish b: to put into operation

Re:Badly Written Article

[mr_matticus]

Hate to burst your bubble, but "effect" is a noun in TFA, not a verb. It is used properly.

Re:Badly Written Article

[poopdeville]

Thanks for that. Unfortunately, I wasn't referring to TFA. I was correcting my GP, when he said:

"The journalist clearly doesn't know what he's talking about. Lossless compression doesn't effect image quality at all."

Please try to keep up.

Don't be so sure.

[Hennell]

It might not completely wipe out jpg, but I don't think people would care enough to try to hang on to it. Most people don't really care what format their photos are in so long as they can edit them and view them without requiring a new hard-drive for storage.

All Microsoft would have to do is add a camera to the Zune with this format and consumers would be using it. If it actually offers lower file size and better picture most manufactures would be happy to add it to their products , claiming its benefits as their own.

If devices support it, image programs will support it and it'll be used more if its actually significantly better. Not to mention as you said the letters HD have quite high marketing potential.

I'm not saying it will be the biggest thing ever, destroying jpg and becoming the ultimate format, more that I don't think it would be too hard for it to do so as I doubt people are really that attached to the format of their photos.

(Plus if Microsoft are smart they could make an 'image library' explorer/organiser progam, that would offer to convert your images and save you xxxMB.)

JPEG KILLER

[dino213b]

I was disappointed to not see "Microsoft unleashes JPEG killer" as a title to this article.

Re:JPEG KILLER

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is, however, also developing a "killer JPEG". 7 days after you view the image Steve Ballmer crawls out of your monitor and throws chairs at you.

Re:JPEG KILLER

[Trillan]

I might have believed you if you'd said "...Windows requires you to activate it again."

Cheating.

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't do anything new, its licencing is restrictive, nothing yet supports it, and there are (probably superior) alternatives already available. The only way this will take off is with help from Microsoft's famous dodgy business techniques.

It will be widespread within three years. All Microsoft has to do is pressure all consumer digital camera manufacturers into supporting it. Thats easily done - make it a requirement for a 'Certified Windows Vista Compatable' logo. Or just offer a cross-promotional marketing deal.

LOL, internet

[Anonymous Coward]

The very fact that it is from mirco$haft

That's amazing!! "micro$haft"?? Did you come up with that all by yourself?? Bwahahahahahah!!! I mean, that's why I come to Slashdot, for the great comedians! Bwahahahahah!!

All things aside, when did the diggtards start invading Slashdot? I want my Slashdot back!

Re:LOL, internet

[True Vox]

As much as I shudder at the term "micro$haft" (and I assure you, I do indeed), at least the above mentioned "diggtard" had the decency to log in before posting. Going AC for someone who claims to be a long time reader of /. is, well, sort of weak in my opinion. Mind you, I'm a bit of a "diggtard" myself, being much more active there, though I was reading /. LONG before Digg showed up in this world. At any rate, logging in is much more conducive to the intelligent conversation that you seem to miss so much (not that AC doesn't have it's place, it's just nice to know who you're talking to, especially if it's a long conversation).

What about patents?

[DoofusOfDeath]

Does an ISO submission imply anything about lack of patent encumbrance?

Re:What about patents?

[jbengt]

No,
It can be patented up the wazoo.
Generally, the only requirement is to license it on RAND (reasonable and ono-discriminatory) terms.

erp, forgot...

[Animaether]

you could store the RAW information in a proper RAW format (e.g. PFM) just fine, and read it out, and parse it with ease, etc. The same can't be said for all the camera manufacturers' proprietary different 'RAW' formats. There's a reason dcraw.c is a fairly big source file :)

PNG over JPG

[LinDVD]

I do Adobe Flash development for some of my work, and I do also use other Adobe/Macromedia tools, like Fireworks and Illustrator. I don't know how I would have done some of the previous work if the alpha channel in PNG wasn't available. Obviously, Adobe Flash is one way to get past the lack of transparency support in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.

A great way to see how JPG is still smaller than PNG in file size, is to use the "Save For Web" feature on a lot of Adobe products, like Photoshop/ImageReady and you can then see the file size estimates adjacent to each other.

PNG is well supported today though. This application, called PAINT.NET http://www.getpaint.net/index2.html (needs .NET 2.0 Framework) defaults to PNG. PAINT.NET is a superior free replacement to MSPAINT, IMHO.

Screenshot of a UI

[Animaether]

assuming it's not some flashy UI, that is. In fact, try an average screenshot of slashdot. PNG should be smaller and lack nasty little bits at the edges of lines. The latter being the important part :)

Doing your own comparison

[dtfinch]

Command line encoder/decoder here. I've had no problems running it on Wine.

Just have to wait and see what more people think about the licensing. If there's any legal risk, HD Photo will be dead to me. Though it looked pretty good in my small completely unscientific test.

Re:Doing your own comparison

[Ilgaz]

Command line encoder/decoder here. I've had no problems running it on Wine.

Just have to wait and see what more people think about the licensing. If there's any legal risk, HD Photo will be dead to me. Though it looked pretty good in my small completely unscientific test. I am running OS X, an OS which is de facto standard in publishing/media and I can't run "Wine" as I am running PowerPC G5 so there is no way I can test it on a system which even Microsoft ads are prepared on.

It explains why this HD (!) format is a joke from beginning.

256 vs trillions of colors

[Animaether]

Oh, absolutely! That's why I use PNG where image quality is absolutely required, even if JPG saves much smaller normally - at the highest quality levels, it actually fares worse!

What I meant was within the context of supporting transparency - PNG supports nice multiple levels of transparency, which was a huge boon over GIF if you have to deal with transparency. Sadly, IE 6 and below didn't support it right, which made it less attractive. So the huge advantage there was basically nixed.

Though, there's no good reason not to use PNG with transparency anyway. There's a few hacks out there, including automatic ones (javascript iterating over all PNG images, replacing them in-line with new ones that use a directx display filter), that are perfecly safe to use. But the damage was already done, I daresay. Hopefully IE7 is slowly changing that, but if MS pushes this format enough.. bleh :|

In other news...

[furry_wookie]

/fast forward to the year 2012

In other news.... "Web developers worldwide were disaapointed that the new IE 12 apparnetly STILL does not support transparency for the HDPhoto graphics file format."

RAW versus "raw", and other major errors...

[SuperBanana]

I don't know where you're getting that statement from. Everybody dissatisfied with JPG - which I can only imagine stems from the fact that it is lossy compression - is either using: (PNG, GIF, EXR.)

You don't understand what "raw" images are used for. They're used PURELY in the acquisition phase. There isn't a (non-webcam/hideously-dumbed down) camera in the world that records to GIF, I don't know of a single camera on the market that records to PNG, and EXR is a very specialized format used mostly in "film" (ie movie production.) No still digital cameras on the market record to it.

'RAW' isn't used by anybody. 'RAW' does not exist. 'RAW' is a collective name for a shitload of formats by a smaller shitload of digital camera companies.

No, it's not. RAW = Canon's "raw" image format. "Raw" image formats are produced by many higher-end digital cameras. I'm sorry you don't understand the distinction between RAW and raw, but it does make it painfully obvious this isn't your area of expertise. It is mine: I've shot RAW images on my Canon dSLR for fun and profit for several years now. I shoot exclusively in RAW format because of the extra bit depth which makes adjustments much more 'transparent' (a level adjustment won't cause as much problems wit 10-12 bit data as it will with 8 bit, and you also have no compression artifacts.) I archive everything in the original Canon RAW format.

Your characterization that "raw" formats are used by a "shitload of smaller digital camera companies" is also completely wrong. Canon's RAW and Nikons's NEF are by far the largest, most commonly used "raw" formats. Phase1 is probably up there with their digital camera backs. I'm now guessing, but Fuji is probably next (Fuji dSLRs were very popular a few years back, in part because the Fuji SuperCCD was superior to almost everything else on the market at the time), followed by Panasonic/Leica, followed by Pentax.

Many point-and-shoot consumer cameras these days are incapable of shooting in a RAW mode; it's left to the "prosumer" models by most manufacturers.

And it is never "RAW".. it is never raw data.. it's compressed, stored integratedly or separately, encrypted or not (SONY, among other) and contains a bunch of camera data.

It most certainly is raw image sensor data; that's the whole point. "Raw" camera formats all use LOSSLESS compression. Yes, all of them contain incredibly useful EXIF-like data in them. This is not, despite your rant, a negative to anyone I know. Few manufacturers encrypt the data; Nikon encrypts the white balance info on one or two models (which happen to be the several-thousand-dollar professional digital SLR bodies.)

In most cameras (certainly the Canons and Nikons), it is, in fact, "raw"; it represents the closest you can get to the original sensor data, with little or no processing (on Canon cameras, I believe they don't even do thermal noise subtraction prior to writing the RAW file; the file even contains the "dead" area of the sensor used for such compensation), and anywhere from 10 to 12 bits per channel precision. No white balance, brightness/contrast, gamma, or sharpening adjustments are applied before the data is recorded.

Re:RAW versus "raw", and other major errors...

[macshit]

EXR is a very specialized format used mostly in "film" (ie movie production.)

Huh? OpenEXR isn't particularly "specialized" (in fact it's pretty flexible) and it's what you want to be using if you're doing HDR photos.

[If it's currently used mostly in film production, that's more likely due to history and the fact that they're incredibly picky about image quality.]

Re:RAW versus "raw", and other major errors...

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe you're mistaken as well. they probably do some color interpolation before the image are stored. the CCD is most likely monochrome with a bayer filter in front of it.

it could be more raw then what your getting, and it might actually be useful to have the raw CCD data. you could inverse the bayer filter in software and have a nice, very high resolution, monochrome intensity bitmap of the original image.

Re:RAW versus "raw", and other major errors...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it is the monochrome data that it records and it really is raw CCD data. Knowing which pattern is on which camera's filter, the software could then recreate colors by itself. Maybe that's why Adobe Camera Raw produces different colors from the manufacturer's software or any other software.

Re:RAW versus "raw", and other major errors...

[modecx]

The format isn't especially specialized (well, in a way it is), however, any piece of equipment taking an image and exporting an EXR file as a result is bound to be pretty specialized (and expensive) in the here and now.

Re:RAW versus "raw", and other major errors...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lovely, RAW vs raw, except RAW is still multiple formats. Canon changes it from camera to camera.

Re:RAW versus "raw", and other major errors...

[Anonymous Coward]

>> 'RAW' is a collective name for a shitload of formats by a smaller shitload of digital camera companies.
> No, it's not. RAW = Canon's "raw" image format.

There are over a dozen raw formats: .raf (Fuji), .crw .cr2 (Canon), .kdc .dcr (Kodak), .mrw (Minolta), .nef (Nikon), .orf (Olympus), .dng (Adobe), .ptx .pef (Pentax), .arw (Sony), .x3f (Sigma)

I don't know why you think that only Canon can capitalize "raw", since all of these are commonly refered to as "RAW" format. E.g. DPReview refers to Sony's format as RAW.
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sonydslra100/page2 .asp

Re:RAW versus "raw", and other major errors...

[BillX]

You, sir, are a dumbass.

There is no "official" RAW (and nobody "owns" .raw) any more than someone owns ".bin" (regardless of how many make this claim). You're right that many implementions of what's referred to as raw/RAW/.raw contain unmolested sensor data, but many massage the format in attempt to "unify" toward a particular implementation, add their own headers/metadata (or even encryption), guesses about preferred gamma/whitebalance, etc., with the result that only their own software knows how to read them. One good "tell" is if your software does not ask you the partnumber of the imager used to take the picture, or at the very least, its vertical and horizontal resolution, number and placement of FPN correction rows, bit depth, color filter pattern, etc. Denoised or not? Calibration lines? Helpful processing data such as sensor temperature (which is not a pixel)? In many cases this data is far from "raw". Even knowing what sensor your camera uses and having its datasheet in-hand is not enough.

(In a group where I was involved hacking low-end digitals, we were able to extract the raw Bayer sensor data using buffer overflows and raw memory reads before its ".raw" output files' compression format was known. IIRC the old timers preferred ".BYR" to refer to this data.)

HD (ot)

[kybred]

1) The 'HD' doesn't stand for High Definition, it's just there to get the association with HD TV in consumers minds. *rolls eyes*

HD is to this decade what turbo was to the '80s and extreme was to the'90s.

Re:HD (ot)

[AJWM]

HD is to this decade what turbo was to the '80s

No kidding. The first few times I heard an ad for "HD radio" I thought it was a gag. I mean, how can radio be high definition? High fidelity, maybe. Maybe it stands for "hyped digital".

Coming soon, Xtreme HD Turbo Whatever!

End of JPEG?

[DragonWriter]

So how does this stack up to the newer JPEG 2000 replacement, rather than the original JPEG?

most sensors are RGB, sorry...

[SuperBanana]

Camera raw formats save the actual output from the image sensor, before applying the numerous algorithms needed to massage the data into RGB format

In 99.9999% of the cameras on the market, the image is digitized in RGB format; there are three sensors wells per pixel with R, G, and B pigmented filters over them, and an aliasing filter above the sensor spreads the light from one area across the three CCD or CMOS sensor "wells." The best sensors use tiny, super-precise micro-lenses to do this. The bad ones simply diffuse the light over a wide enough area to cover the 3 color sensors. Image quality obviously suffers, as the blur also extends three "columns", not just three 'rows'. Microlens aliasing filters only spread the light in one direction.

The processing applied usually consists of thermal noise compensation using a small masked area of the sensor, "noise reduction" (ie, various half-assed blurring algorithms), white balance, contrast/brightness adjustments, saturation and "sharpening", downsampling (the better cameras have 10-12 bit A-to-D converters; all of the dSLRs do) and then JPEG compression. It is quite common for non-pro/non-"prosumer" cameras to add quite a bit of artificial sharpening and boost contrast to make photos that "look good".

Re:most sensors are RGB, sorry...

[Anonymous Coward]

Please mention something about Bayer color filters like the GP poster - or show me a non-video image sensor that has pixels arranged in RGB triads/columns. Those 8MPixel sensors are 4MPixels of green, 2M of red and blue each... and converting the raw data to a *good* RGB image isn't exactly trivial.

(*only example I know of is the Foveon sensor which just plain overlaps the RGB pixels on top of each other, and it hasn't exactly swept the market.)

Re:most sensors are RGB, sorry...

[Goaway]

You seems to be quite confused on the layout of image sensors. Most cameras use one sensor per pixel, and interpolate colour information from neighbouring pixels. The only notable exception being the previously mentioned Foveon sensors, which haven't really caught on.

And I don't know what you're trying to say in the second half of the post - my point was that by saving in raw format, you skip all those steps you're describing, in order to do them later on the computer with more control over the result.

Re:But ODF format isn't GPL

[Talchas]

You couldn't GPL a format. You could GPL the specs (although you probably would use the GFDL), but that wouldn't make a ton of sense - you want a spec to be consistent.

GeoTIFF and BigTIFF formats

[Lord Satri]

I agree. In geospatial technologies (e.g. satellite imagery, aerial photography, GIS, topography, etc.) the GeoTIFF format is commonly used for georeferenced raster data. Additionally, the BigTIFF format proposal comes to the rescue to circumvent TIFF's 4 gigs maximum size.

And WMA was supposed to be the end of MP3...

[plazman30]

And look what happened there. WMV was supposed to be the death of MPEG-4/Divx. And the Zune was supposed to be the death of the iPod. They try so hard and always come up short.

I'm sure the format has a boatload of patents associated with it that would preclude it from being used in any open source projects.

Heck, if JPEG2000 and MP3Pro can't catch on, what makes them think this will?

Re:And WMA was supposed to be the end of MP3...

[SwashbucklingCowboy]

Heck, if JPEG2000 and MP3Pro can't catch on, what makes them think this will?

Because a company recently came up with a patent claim on jpeg. That company is seeking to have companies license that patent. Meanwhile, Microsoft has said that HD Photo will be made available (is available?) under its Open Specification Promise, which makes any "necessary" patents to implement available for free.

If you were a developer, which format would you rather use? An old format that requires you to pay money to use it? Or a new one that doesn't?

Re:And WMA was supposed to be the end of MP3...

[plazman30]

I believe the supposed patent on JPEG is about to run out. Also the company hasn't actually won anything in court. Sony settled out of court. It's my understanding that other users of JPEG gave the company the big middle finger. JPEG2000 also has patents on it that are under some kind of open specification promise. So, people have a choice, they can use JPEG and risk litigation, or use JPEG2000 and be safe. Most people are using JPEG.

Re:And WMA was supposed to be the end of MP3...

[steveoc]

And NetBEUI/LAN Manager was supposed to be the end of TCP/IP.

And lets not forget how Microsoft decided that 'The Internet' was a good plan, but that TCP/IP was not the right way to do it. They tried very hard to kill the internet, and they pushed 'The Microsoft Network' as a twisted alternative. Remember trumpet winsock and all the bullshit you would have to go through just to get a windows box talking TCP/IP ??

There developed a big fight that was dragged on over at least a year or two. Every print publication absolutely poured rubbish all over TCP/IP and 'The Internet', and this was all funded by Microsoft advertisting dollars, and those of their allies in this battle. (At the time, IBM was a very close ally of MS, and IBM was all out to kill Unix before it grew any bigger. This was in the days before MS pulled the big double cross on IBM over OS/2, effectively creating the enormous IBM Linux monster we see today)

Anyway, the 'Battle for the Internet' was won in the end by the 'geeks' who ran the backend machines. The hand that rocks the cradle and all that.

And as soon as it was obvious to even Microsoft that they were not going to win that one, they cut their loses, buried 'The Microsoft Network' deeply away with their other failures, and then jumped on the TCP/IP bandwagon. Shortly after that, they purchase spyglass, rebrand it as IE, and then turn up the marketting machine. (They pulled the launch of Windows95, and hit back with 'Windows95 with Internet Explorer' as a rushed facelift)

As a result, 99% of the public today, and no small number of 'techs' who dont know their history very well - believe that Windows IS the internet, or at least that Microsoft has been a strong supporter of this whole internet thing, and the standards that surround it.

The truth of the matter is that for a period of several years, Microsoft WAS at the head of a desperate battle to KILL the internet before it really took off. They spent a fortune, and used every dirty trick in their play book to kill it. They failed ...

They obviously still dont like TCP/IP because of all this - since there are so many leftovers of their alternate tools making up the networking framework in every windows box out there today, including Vista ...

See http://www.faughnan.com/netbios.html for a good rundown on the crap in their stack.

It is very sad that they dont teach TECHO HISTORY in schools. We came VERY CLOSE to never having an internet at all, thanks to the determined efforts of MS. Losing that fight pretty much marked the end of the road for MS - they have been on a downward slide ever since.

I think that out of a sense of spite, MS goes around just trying its damndest to mess with standards, so it can at least win ONE little battle, since it lost the real big one years ago. Everything they do it seems - OOXML, WMV, .doc files, kerberos, DHTML, MS-Java, IE css 'standards', etc, etc, etc - seems to be motivated by pure spite.

Re:And WMA was supposed to be the end of MP3...

[TheNetAvenger]

And look what happened there. WMV was supposed to be the death of MPEG-4/Divx.

You do realize that WMV VC1 is a default standard for HD media content, just like MPEG4.

You also realize that most Disc released in HD-DVD or Blue-Ray are using VC-1 (WMV) because many studios find it faster and better quality.

WMV is NOT going anywhere, and in fact with new IPTV and other things that seem to skip over a lot of people in the anti-MS world, WMV is very strong and continues to grow.

(I am not here to say WMV is the worlds best, but it has made its own ground and for quality does have the industry's respect.)

PS You also realize that DIVX is based on MS's MPEG4 codecs of the late 1990s?

BTW - WMV has to do with HD Photo again how?

Re:And WMA was supposed to be the end of MP3...

[FreeUser]

I'm sure the format has a boatload of patents associated with it that would preclude it from being used in any open source projects.

In the US, sure. But the US is already more or less a technological backwater, and the rest of the world can move right along and include support for this format in any product anyone likes, be it GPLed or not.

That having been said, I doubt anyone would want to bother unless Microsoft leverages its desktop dominance to force it down our throats (as others mentioned, via "vista certified" logos coercing camera manufacturers to adopt the technology, etc.) and makes it commonplace. If that happens, it will only be free software in the United States that is limited, not the rest of the world. Much like PGP, individuals will just download from overseas sites and "route around" the issue.

On a philosophical/strategic note, this format needs to be resisted. The US may be falling ever further behind the technological/social/political curve, but it is still a sizeable market, and one worth fighting for. The point is, though, that if this particular battle is lost (and Microsoft does succeed in inflicting this format on the world), the damage is to one backward country foolish enough to adopt software patents, and really, only to the industry of that country (as the end user can route around the problem and download the software from overseas).

Re:And WMA was supposed to be the end of MP3...

[Alioth]

WMV *has* killed these file formats for home movies, though. Every video I've been sent by a friend in the last two years has been WMV, rather than DivX or plain MPEG-4 - and it's been a monumental pain in the ass until VLC could play WMV9 files. All Microsoft have to do is make this new file format the default for Windows photo applications, and before long, when people send you a photo attachment in email, it'll no longer be JPEG, but this new Windows-only patent encumbered format.

Re:And WMA was supposed to be the end of MP3...

[Salsaman]

The remaining JPEG patents expired last year. So JPEG is now a free format ! Woot !

Re:And WMA was supposed to be the end of MP3...

[petermgreen]

or use JPEG2000 and be safe
s/safe/at risk of an unknown patent holder poping up and causing hell/

the older a format gets the less likely it is that will happen, patent holders only have so much patiance and they have a lot less leverage once the patent expires (they can still go after past damages but they won't be able to get injunctions and doctrines like latches will probablly also come into play limiting the damages they can get) and a patent newer than the reference encoder/decoder should not affect straight implementations of those because of prior-art (I know the US system currently sucks at enforcing this properly but its still better to have prior art than not to have it).

the forgent claim was a bombshell but i belive in the end the uspto invalidated the patent and it also expired meaning they can only claim against past use of jpeg not current use ;) and the ongoing lawsuits were settled for relatively small sums. In summary forgent did manage to extort some money but the issue is over.

Re:And WMA was supposed to be the end of MP3...

[Anonymous Coward]

And personally I'm pissed off at every single WMA file I see. Every time one of my friends buys a CD and wants to rip it, they simply use WMP which doesn't even have an option for anything other than WMA...
Really makes me sick

Re:And WMA was supposed to be the end of MP3...

[plazman30]

All the DirecTV HD satellite streams are in MPEG4 and not WMV. So, WMV is not everywhere. Yes, I realize that divx is based off of MS-MPEG4, which is based off of the MPEG-4 spec defined by the MPEG group. MS abandoned MPEG4 when they realized they couldn't own it. Microsoft also abandoned ASF, which they developed and owned. I just don't see anyone switching off of JPEG

Won't somebody please think of the porn industry

[Provocateur]

I believe it will be here where it will be met with stiff resistance
 

Vista supports 128 bit internal rendering of gfx

[dudeX]

Microsof'ts HD Photo format is a forward looking codec. Vista can support future displays that will have wider gamuts and high dynamic range. Right now most video cards only support 8 bits per channel for color (24 bit, the other 8 bits are for alpha channels, meaning that it can quickly apply color effects efficiently).

It is possible that in 2009, people will be buying wide gamut, high dynamic range displays in numbers, so it will become evident that the old graphic file formats aren't going to look as good anymore. HD Photo can fill that need by having the high bit rate for more expressive colors, as well as offering compression comparable to JPEG so that it can be used online. It also offers the flexiblity to trade files uncompressed for maximum detail.

I suppose everyone can use a format like OpenEXR for high bit info, but I don't think it compresses as well as HD Photo.

Nevertheless, I am going to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt that they're not going to sue people for decoding HD Photo. However, I don't know how flexible they will be with people encoding it. I think now the general industry has wisened up to close formats and now will consider open formats from now on.

Patents?

[Sloppy]

It's possible that Microsoft actually can displace JPEG with this. If it's unpatented or they totally relinquish control and even a penny of royalties. Otherwise, this will just languish in the same obscurity as JPEG 2000, and people will be saying, "Looks cool; I look forward to starting to use this in 20 years."

Format patents retard the advance of technology. Get rid of the patent, and the technology can be adopted. Keep the patent, and everything grinds to a halt.

Remains of the...

[misterhypno]

JPEG will remain for quite some time simply because there are so many OF them OUT there.

There IS something to be said for quantity in the supply-side of the equation...

And this new format - HD-M$ or whatever - is simply ANOTHER way that Microsoft is trying to keep a tight grip on a software market that is slipping through their fingers...

Grand Moff Gates...? ..."Run? From a handful of formats? I hardly think... BLAM!!"

With apologies to Moebius Strip Theater's classic "Stage Wars (or "Who's Biggs?")"... and the character takeoff of the Grand Off Target...

So is this idea of theirs...

Your compression may vary, obviously.

Re:But ODF format isn't GPL

[Red Alastor]

According to the GPL FAQ the resulting file can only be GPLed if some of your application code is inserted in it but it can't be guaranteed to stay GPL as that bit of code can be stripped.

You know what's funny?

[Anonymous Coward]

People arguing back and forth about ridiculous resolutions and lossless compression and new file formats to support 12 billion bits/primary, but you can't find a single LCD monitor that tells you if it has 6 or 8 bits/primary. Yeah, all that hard work for what?

It's like buying a CD player that only has 12 bits per channel and uses only 22.05KHz sample rate, AND NO ONE COMPLAINS.

So I don't see the point of yet another format when the hardware can't keep up.

Non-destructive to Pr0n

[xactuary]

Microsoft claims that adjustments can be made to color balance and exposure settings that won't discard or truncate data that occurs with other bit-map formats.

So my pr0n stays fresh? Sweet!

Oh, Please

[Anonymous Coward]

that's just what we need is yet ANOTHER image format tied up in eternal patent litigation. And Digg and Slashdot nearly unanimous in singing its praises, like Microsoft was the Second Coming. Some of you people are disgusting. Could you at least wipe the shit from your nose after sucking Gates' crack before posting?

PNG is good enough for every daily practical use. Every other format can kiss my ass, no matter who owns the patent.

Re:It's not the format, stupid. It's the license.

[Daltorak]

The license for HD Photo is unusually permissive for something that comes from Microsoft. It's available as part of the same Open Specification Promise that covers Office Open XML and the various WS-* web service protocols. Red Hat's general counsel has stated that OSP is compatible with FOSS licenses, and Lawrense Rosen has approved of it as well. So, chances are good that it's safe.

Remember that almost -no- software comes free of a license. The expectation that anything will be "unburdened by licensing or copyright" is a bit unrealistic. A good license that asserts rights favourable to you is actually a lot better than no license at all. The GPL v2, permissive as it may be, has rights and requirements just like any other license.

Software patents are always hanging around waiting to screw people over, too. Since it's unlikely that we'll see fundamental changes in the legality of software patents anytime soon, the best thing in the short- to mid-term for open-source software that gets into novel territories is for some big corporation like IBM, Sun, or even Microsoft to scoop up the patents for those new technologies, then explicitly state that they will never pursue litigation. That'll help save FOSS projects from being targeted by litigous turds who hold a patent on something obscure.

Now the only way Microsoft is going to get anywhere with HD Photo in the longer term is to:
a) prove that it's actually technically better than other formats out there (and this sounds like it's the case, given that it can offer the same quality as JPEG, in half the file size, with faster encoding and decoding to boot)... they won't need to twist anyone's arms into creating implementations if it's really that much better.
b) submit it to standards bodies. ANSI, ISO, Ecma all lend a lot of credibility to any specification.
c) maintain an open process for working on new revisions.
d) convince porn sites to use it. seriously! if a porn site could save 40, 50% of their bandwidth by switching image formats, they'd be all over it.

am I following this right?

[wagonlips]

Something like 20 minutes after MS finally releases a browser capable of rendering a transparent PNG correctly (about a decade after the PNG was released), they're gonna' sell us a new and improved graphic format?

Are they completely hopped up on goofballs over there?

Re:Vista supports 128 bit internal rendering of gf

[nrgy]

What are you talking about most video cards only support 8 bits per channel? Your whole post stinks of some MS fan boy trying to hide the fact he is one, this added by the fact you clearly know nothing of what your talking about. Your blatant lack of knowledge in anything relating to bit depth, compression and other file formats leaves me to wonder why you would even post on such a response. You obviously have never worked with OpenGL, DX, or anything relating to graphics programing/graphics cards.

Heres two tips that will hopefully help pull you away from being an ignorant moron in posts you know nothing about.

1: Go read on graphics cards and bit depths. "Hint: If they only supported 8 bits then wtf is HDR doing in the Half Life 2 engine?"
2: Go read up on OpenEXR and while your doing that read on its compression schemes. And that being said ILM never made OpenEXR to replace anything other then to fix a problem that existed in their pipeline during that period of time.

Re: Intended License

[Anonymous Coward]

How does MicroSoft intend to license it?

Bend over and spread; i.e. same as Windows, Office, etc.

Camera manufactuers should be cautious

[the_womble]

Surely the camera manufacturers will be a bit distrustful of an MS format after MS unexpectedly tried to collect money from them for using FAT.

It seems to me that using any new format is very high risk. You do not know what patents may exist on it - not only those held by the deviser of the format (which may be safely covered by a license agreement), but any held by third parties.

Of course even a format that has been around a while may be hit by an unexpected claim (as recently with mp3), but as a format gets olders the lower the risk, and once it has been in use for longer patents last, it is completely safe.

RAND is discriminatory...

[Myria]

...against free software. License fees from other companies don't mean anything to Microsoft - it's locking out free software that they care about.

Read the Wikipedia article

[cooldev]

Before slamming the format, please read more about it. Regardless of what you think about Microsoft, I think it has great potential. Some highlights:

• High dynamic range
• Embedded ICC color profile
• Lossy and lossless compression
• Ability to decode part of the image without decoding the whole thing (see below)
• Ability to crop, downsample (i.e. thumbnails), and rotate without decoding the whole image
• Very efficient encoding and decoding, useful not only on the desktop, but also specifically designed for fast encoding and decoding on devices like digital cameras
• High quality and small file size. (Around half the file size as JPEG (or) twice the quality. Claimed to be similar to JPEG 2000 without the additional performance and memory impact.)
• TIFF-like container
• The licence for the format *is* supposedly compatible with the GPL; only the source code for the reference implementation is not.

Also, take a look at http://labs.live.com/photosynth and http://blogs.msdn.com/billcrow. To quote one thing from his blog:

Because this is a compressed domain operation, the server never had to decode or re-encode the compressed data to create this low resolution "thumbnail" of the larger, high resolution image. The only work involved was to copy a portion of the compressed data and wrap it up in a container to make a new HD Photo file. This very small HD Photo file is sent across the network connection, and then decoded by the HD Photo codec on the client to provide the low resolution view required for the particular display.

When zooming in to the fine details of a high resolution image, the HD Photo codec is able to very quickly extract an arbitrary rectangular region by accessing only the image tiles that overlap that region. Like the mipmaps described above, this is accomplished by simply extracting a small portion of the compressed data and building a new (and very small) HD Photo file to be sent across the network. The client receives and decodes this small file, combining it with the other segments required to display the required view.

IMHO this seems like a well-balanced format that has most of the advantages of a cornucopia of different formats (JPEG, JPEG 2000, RAW, TIFF) without the corresponding disadvantages. If it's not successful, I at least hope something equivalent is!

Re:Read the Wikipedia article

[Anonymous Coward]

It could be the best thing since sliced bread and orgasms but I wouldn't touch it with YOUR ten foot pole if it comes from MS... because they've earned that level of distrust and have already tried to play fast and loose with licensing in the past (take a look at the whole Sender-ID fiasco if you have any doubts).

Re:Read the Wikipedia article

[cooldev]

An AC wrote:

It could be the best thing since sliced bread and orgasms but I wouldn't touch it with YOUR ten foot pole if it comes from MS... because they've earned that level of distrust and have already tried to play fast and loose with licensing in the past (take a look at the whole Sender-ID fiasco if you have any doubts).

I'm not aware of the details on this issue, but based on some web searches it sounds like it was fairly quickly resolved in a way that enabled GPL implementations, PLUS it sounds like the HD Photo spec was made to be compatible from the outset.

Regardless, if your sole measuring stick for new technology is whether the company decides to *not only* give it away free, but does so in a way that respects the transitive/viral nature of the GPL, then you're clearly out of touch with reality. Have fun doing low-level tech support and janitorial work all your life! Cheers!

Re:Read the Wikipedia article

[Anonymous Coward]

Also: Patented to death.

Re:Read the Wikipedia article

[upside]

I'm not sure if it's always a good thing to have all the features packed into one format. Instead of choosing a format for a task, now you have to wade through a bunch of save-as options to get an image to fit a given situation. This is probably OK for the tech savvy, but you'll probably have problems explaining it to a layman.

"But mr. newspaper editor, I _did_ send the photo in a format you requested. What do you mean 'lossy'? Have you lost it already? Oh, I see. Could you please tell me which tab in the Save As dialog I'll find that in? Hmm... Still can't find that option. Yes, it's probably called something else in the software I use. No, I don't have a Mac. I use Windows."

Re:Read the Wikipedia article

[Salsaman]

I'm not aware of the details on this issue,

Obviously

but based on some web searches it sounds like it was fairly quickly resolved in a way that enabled GPL implementations

Wrong ! See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Photo#Licensing

Re:Read the Wikipedia article

[cooldev]

If you look at the history people have been changing Licensing section of the Wikipedia article as we speak, but it still sounds to me like what I said is true: GPL software can use the format, but it would be have to be implemented based on the spec and not the reference implementation. I guess we will have to wait and see if it's officially added to the "Open Specification Promise".

Re:Read the Wikipedia article

[Repugnant_Shit]

Sounds a lot like DNG.

Re:Read the Wikipedia article

[foniksonik]

That does sound good.... hmmm Microsoft how does it feel to do something that feels like innovation?

Re:Read the Wikipedia article

[cooldev]

Sounds a lot like DNG.

DNG is an attempt by Adobe to consolidate RAW formats. As a digital photographer I hope they're successful too.

But think of it this way: in a photographer's workflow one does not usually alter the RAW (or DNG) file -- it's the raw sensor data from the camera. In other words, DNG is the digital negative, and HD Photo would be more like the "print", with the cropping and sharpening applied, tweaked level/curves, etc..

It sounds like Adobe is also interested embracing HD Photo and doesn't consider it a competitor to DNG.

Re:Read the Wikipedia article

[Reziac]

The zoom functionality reminds me of a demo I saw from HP, probably 7 or 8 years ago, that was meant to allow partial views of ad content over the web. You picked the section you wanted to zoom in on, and it only sent you full data for that part. Looked useful, but never caught on.

Hmm... I think the OP had it right

[Anonymous Coward]

PNG has higher quality images than JPG and an alpha channel.
I don't see the incorrectness of the OP.

(You're not thinking of lowly PNG-8 are you? PNG-24 vastly
surpasses JPG in image quality)

Then again... I suppose if you're talking about high levels of
compression, then JPG works better for photos
and PNG for line art. But if you're talking about print quality
imaging, PNG rules JPG. The multiple levels of alpha
blow away JPG in terms of usability.

Re:It's not the format, stupid. It's the license.

[steelfood]

JPEG isn't going anywhere as far as the preferred internet image format goes. What Microsoft might be thinking about entering is the digital point-and-shoot photography market, and maybe a little of the clip art market as well. But they're gonna have to jump through hoops to get that. They don't have their own digital cameras to generate pictures in this format, and they'll need to get the major image manipulation software companies on board before they can even begin to hope for any adoption. Which means that they'll have to convince adobe to support it at the very least, and last I heard, Microsoft and Adobe's relationship wasn't particularly good, especially when it comes to formats--something about Microsoft dicking Adobe over by creating True Type Fonts or something alone those line.

You fools...

[Anonymous Coward]

HD -- that's a smiley ^^

widely supported?

[Riquez]

If it's widely supported by browsers, OS's, PDA's, phones, playstations, web tv, photo cd's & dvd's, email apps, [word, excel, powerpoint (& the superior rivals)], printers, print shops, memory card printers & copiers, cameras, ipods & design apps I think it might have a chance.

Since Microsoft won't even be supporting it fully in their own apps (no evidence, but its just obvious right) I don't think it has much chance.

IW44

[transami]

Here's the thing iw44 has been around a LONG TIME. It's wavelet, basically on par with JPEG2000 amnd is used by DjVu, so it's pretty much readiably available. And it's free. So why isn't it being used?

B/c, face it, people Sheep.

3:2 is standard

[r00t]

4:3 is for the low-end models. The cameras with replaceable lenses tend to use 3:2, Olympus's 4/3 system excepted.

Re:But ODF format isn't GPL

[ceoyoyo]

It can't be. The GPL is a convenient boilerplate that specifies precisely which copy rights a copyright holder is giving away, under what conditions. In order to give away copy rights, you have to hold them in the first place. You can have whatever copyright you want on ODF, but it affects only ODF, or derivatives of it. My data, though it may be in ODF format, is still under my copyright.

What about submarine patents?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, MS might have patented the shit out of this, but that doesn't mean some piss-ant little company won't come along in five years if this format gets established and start filing lawsuits against Adobe, Microsoft, Sony, Canon, HP, and Kodak for software and cameras that support it. Much like the huge $1.5 billion suit MS recently got slapped with over MP3.

The one saving grace of all those crappy proprietary camera RAW formats is that patent problems aren't really much of an issue since there's little or no compression. And JPEG, for all its problems, has the advantage that it will soon be free of patent problems (GIF is free now, camera makers could start using it, along with some metadata, as the new RAW if they wanted to agree on a single format)

Re:Vista supports 128 bit internal rendering of gf

[dudeX]

I am talking about the communication from the OS to the videocard to the display.
Before Windows Vista, the OS was limited to 8 bits per channel (RGB) OUTPUT for the video card. The video card will only get 8 bit of data per channel from the OS, so even if you have a nice ATI card that can do 10 bit per channel (RGB) output from the port, it's still being fed 8bpc data.

Cards from Matrox that can output 10 bit grayscale for 10 bit monochrome displays use DirectX and special drivers to overcome this limitation. Matrox video cards also support 10bpc in Photoshop using a special plugin/driver. However, you have to run the plugin and switch away from the Photoshop interface to see the extra bit of colors.

I know that OpenGL can do high bit rendering, like in the case of the nVidia Quadro cards, or just using floating point representation. The Quardo uses 128 bit precision for all the fancy 3d effects. However what you're seeing on screen is limited by 8bpc output of your video card (though a quadro supports 12 bit output)

Windows Vista supports 128 bit at the OS level. That means you can have a video card that can output 10bpc (for 30 bits total) and it will contain real information that let's say a nice HDTV can read (using HDMI). Or you can just open a regular RGBA image (32 bits) and using a some sort of 3d program to do fancy compositing using different textures and store the information in 128 bit (or the lesser formats; look at MSDN for the various encoding schemes) for speed.

The point is, Vista has the headroom to really display images that contain more than 8bpc (RGB). I'm hoping that Linux would follow suit (it will once HDR displays become commercialy viable) and I believe Mac OS X Leopard will also have this high bit output support (though I have not found any evidence of that yet.)

Re:It's not the format, stupid. It's the license.

[Wesley Felter]

Here's the Open Specification Promise; I don't see any mention of HD Photo. If it is really included, can someone provide evidence?

sure.. all they need to do

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has all the power to push a new photo format that will largely replace jpg. All they need to do is:

1. Publish portable, fast, bugless, public domain reader/writer
2. Have it completely unencumbered by patents
3. Be better than jpg: smaller, better image quality, optional lossless alpha, and be faster to decode

Of course, being microsoft, they probably won't be able to do any of the above.

Re:sure.. all they need to do

[Mihai Cartoaje]

Are there many people who need a lossless alpha channel in lossy images?

This is all nice.... until you look at the eye

[aepervius]

How many color can a human ultimatively discern ? How many tint of the same color ? So.... Can you recall me why we would need so many colors ?

Re:This is all nice.... until you look at the eye

[tomstdenis]

shush you, I can see the difference between 300fps and 301fps, hear audio in the 40khz range and run a quarter mile in 2 seconds, for I am ....

INTERNET TOUGH GUY (tm) :-)

Wiki [lazy to find links] has nice graphs about colour sensitivity. People would be shocked to learn that it's not-linear [much like our hearing]. Where the bits do matter is in processing. But once you balance your image [and all that...] 8bpp is about all you need.

Tom

Re:This is all nice.... until you look at the eye

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the eye can distinguish more than 256 shades of a color. In medical imaging, 10 and 12 bit greyscale formats are used. A few years ago I atended a talk by an employee of ARRI (maker of professional film equipment) who said that you need between 12-14 bits per color component to be able to represent any color the human eye can distinguish; less if you used a logarithmic scale (similar to A-Law and U-Law encoded audio).

So using 128 bits floating point is not necessary, but has the following advantages:

a) Fits naturally into today's computer architectures - SSE2 (or is it SSE3 ?) can support this natively.
b) Using a 32 bit float per component means you don't really have to worry about overflow during computations.

Re:This is all nice.... until you look at the eye

[dudeX]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_spaceW iki page on CIE XYZ chromaticity.
This chart explains the range of colors the average human being sees. Currently, most monitors display sRGB which is smaller than the triangle than you see in the second chart. Some high end displays show larger triangles that cover roughly 70% of that CIE XYZ chart.

Some rough numbers. The human eye can see roughly 2 million distinct shades. Your video card can do 16.7 million colors, though only about 800,000 distinct shades for a given brightness on a typical display. The real contrast is roughly 500:1 on a typical display (accounting for all viewable colors)
Your eye has incredible range of contrast, which hopefully the next generation of displays can approximate.

I wanted to hate DNG, but liked it instead.

[Kadin2048]

I'll preface this by saying that on the topic of file and data formats in general, I am intensely conservative. I think it's ridiculous to switch to a new format or compression scheme, unless the benefits are massive -- in particular I've never understood people who seem to gleefully parade from one file compression system to the next every few years, abandoning perfectly good and well-understood formats for ones that don't have decent, widely-available reference implementations; but I digress -- but I'm rather bullish on DNG.

I don't know whether Adobe will pull it off, but I hope that it succeeds, or at least survives.

TIFF is a huge mess. Let's face it; it's a gigantic cockup. Anyone can write TIFF files, but they're nearly impossible to "read" in the sense that a user is going to expect: if I say that my application will "read TIFFs," they're going to expect that anything with a TIF extension is going to get read. And that's almost never the case; you can pack just too much stuff into the container.

(Although container formats have a certain elegance to them from a geek perspective, I'm not sure they're all they're cracked up to be. The number of times I've gotten a video file that I don't have a codec for, but have no way of knowing about until I try to open it, because the codec is concealed inside the MOV or AVI container, or similar problems with TIFs, is beyond number. There's some good sense in eliminating container formats, or at least tying the file extension and other metadata, not to the container, but to the codec inside.)

What I hope that Adobe can do, is give us some neutral ground that the various camera manufacturers can agree to use, so we can break away from the per-manufacturer RAW file formats, and the TIFF morass for interchange.

DNG already has support in probably the biggest single application of consequence, and that's Photoshop, and now they've got quite a few camera manufacturers on board, and the specification is open so there are FOSS implementations. Ed Hamrick's excellent VueScan scanning software produces them, too, and perhaps SilverFast will join the party sometime soon. If they can get the middle-market of consumer and prosumer cameras on board, then I think it will have a chance at achieving dominance from the imaging sensors on down the chain.

There's a lot to be said for it; anyone can implement it, but at the same time, there's some centralized control over the format, so that every Tom, Dick, and Harry can't build on their own crappy extension to the format and create the sort of Balkanization that's plagued TIFF. Hopefully, this will mean that people can implement it, and be confident that if they say that their app will 'read DNG,' that it will actually read all the various types of DNG files that users will throw at it.

If that's the only thing that DNG did, it would be a huge step forward.

Re:I wanted to hate DNG, but liked it instead.

[drgonzo59]

DNG = TIFF (with a restricted subset of tags) + extra meta information.

There's a lot to be said for it; anyone can implement it, but at the same time, there's some centralized control over the format, so that every Tom, Dick, and Harry can't build on their own crappy extension to the format and create the sort of Balkanization that's plagued TIFF.
Until one day Adobe is bought by some other software giant and abandons DNG or moves to JPEG9324 (just kidding, but you get the idea). All of the sudden it will be up to Harry Volunteer to write encoders/decoders for DNG. The answer is a an open _standard _ like PNG. The 'standard' part is important because there are already 200+ different tiff types and subtypes. Some use restricted compression standards some have funky tags that will crash some specific program etc. So use PNG! [Unless you desperately need to store data in CMYK only...].

Re:I wanted to hate DNG, but liked it instead.

[fireboy1919]

TIFF is a huge mess. Let's face it; it's a gigantic cockup. Anyone can write TIFF files, but they're nearly impossible to "read" in the sense that a user is going to expect: if I say that my application will "read TIFFs," they're going to expect that anything with a TIF extension is going to get read. And that's almost never the case; you can pack just too much stuff into the container.

I fail to see how DNG is going to be any different from this. They've already said that there are going to be multiple versions of it as it evolves, and it is already a limited subset of tiff - which, by the way, isn't terribly efficient.

We need to have something that does at least as well as zip for lossless stuff, (that's probably okay with DNG since Adobe is trying to get it use for cameras), and wavelet transforms for lossy stuff.
Personally, I'd prefer that this means that we standardize on two formats.

You may be thinking, "but we have jpeg for lossy." Why isn't this enough? The answer is maps. Those suckers are huge, but you want to put them on tiny devices for navigating. Further, you want it to be easy to zoom in to really small resolutions without seeing horrible artifacts. DWT does this much, much better than DCT.

You like DNG for one? Works for me. Existing TIFF readers can be retrofitted to read DNG. I suspect, though, that this format will get about as much play time as PNG gets now. Given a JP2 and a DNG that's 95% larger, but both look almost identical, which do you think people will want to use in their portable devices?

Right now I'm still thinking that jpeg2000 is good for general purpose use (when you care about storage space more than processing power - which is almost all of the time). It's already got support in a lot of apps and is well understood. I imagine that as images get bigger, the desire to use this space-saving format, or another one that uses DWT will probably creep in.

Not Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not weird at all. I remember, from the DOS era, that I had to run a GIF "shrinker" on my files before sending them out. On a 14.4 modem, it could make a huge difference when dealing with multiple files. Even during the last half of the 90's, that little utility was of great help when trying to make web sites load faster. It was with the advent of 56K modems that I stopped caring. Wow, it sounded so fast back then.

GIF shrinker

[Tumbleweed]

Didn't those GIF shrinkers merely remove all meta data from the file, rather than actually compress it better? My understanding is that that isn't what's going on with utilities like pngout and pngcrush.

Re:GIF shrinker

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I thought and it was true with most of them. The one I kept using did something else though. Back then, I tested it with different files and adding and removing meta data.

With Photoshop's Web export, there's a method that rearranges pixels for better compressability. At low values, there isn't much difference from the original that I can see. Maybe it was using such a technique.

Yeah Yeah, but what's in it for Microsoft?

[mrnick]

I wouldn't use this if you paid me, unless it made me Oprah rich. Anytime Microsoft introduces a file scheme you can be assured they have some hidden agenda behind it. Most likely this will be closed code / format. So, sure you will be able to benefit from all the great features as long as you use Internet Explorer or the like. Whenever Microsoft releases some new product, service, or specification ask yourself what is in it for them? Because the empirical evidence has shown that they have no altruistic motives behind anything they are involved with.

Nick Powers

May I borrow a hat?

[stewbacca]

The day Microsoft innovates ANYTHING in the graphics design field is the day I'll eat a hat. And I'll post it to Youtube.

Re:May I borrow a hat?

[big4ared]

You can have mine. I have some ketchup for you if you'd like. Microsoft has one of the best graphics research groups in the world, probably the best. The gold standard for publishing graphics research is Siggraph, and last year they had authors on 18 of the 98 papers. In contrast, MIT faculty had 5, Intel had 2, and AMD/nVidia/ATI had 0. In the world of graphics, MS Research is a powerhouse. You can see the official list of papers here: http://www.siggraph.org/s2006/main.php?f=conferenc e&p=papers or the entire list on one page: http://www.cs.brown.edu/~tor/sig2006.html I certainly don't love MS either, but they have a lot of exceptional graphics people as MS Research.

Re:May I borrow a hat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Quantity != Quality especially where Microsoft are concerned. Direct3D was(/is?) a fucking joke for anything other than gaming, and even there it lagged behind OpenGL for a decade. This new file format of theirs is commonly called TIFF. A lossy codec for ILM's OpenEXR format would be welcomed by the industry, we don't need this MSTiff rubbish. It doesn't matter how smart the researchers are when the company pulling the strings is pure evil.

Re:May I borrow a hat?

[xtracto]

How was that hat?

Can you post the Youtube link please?

Re:May I borrow a hat?

[Repugnant_Shit]

What the hell does SIGGRAPH have to do with graphics design? This HD Photo is a fucking JPEG "killer," not a 3D engine or some new pipeline technology. We're talking about Microsoft and their all-around-horrible graphic/photo tools. Attempting to lure people away from programs like Photoshop/Paintshop/Elements/Gimp/Aperture with stupid shit like Photo Editor.

Re:May I borrow a hat?

[stewbacca]

I'm still waiting for the innovative Microsoft graphic design to surface. The best thing I've seen from them is from their Mac business unit. The clipart in Mac office is at least usable. Same for the PowerPoint templates.

PNG compression via Photoshop CS2

[Tumbleweed]

'web export'? Do you mean 'Save for Web'? If so, that doesn't seem to be true, at least in my experience. I just now saved a B&W web comic (SinFest!) strip into 24-bit and 8-bit PNG files via Save for Web, then compressed them further with pngout:

  77876 test.gif
122820 test24-original.png
  91656 test24-pngout.png
  65095 test8-original.png
  62631 test8-pngout.png

JPEG2000

[Anonymous Coward]

All the same features that JPEG2000 has, but JPEG 2000 also has backwards compatibility, they can display at normal resolutions on things that can only view JPEGs.

Stupid Microsoft!!

[Tei]

This infuriate me!.
The ones that always break standards are tryiing to make one? give me a break!.

Please, Microsoft guys, implemente PNG correctly on ALL versions of IE (yea, backpatch!), and I will get any new format from microsoft seriously.
If you can't get the basics, why are tryiing something advanced?

Re:Stupid Microsoft!!

[erroneus]

It would be interesting to know if MS wants to include properties like embedded scripting or other objects that are executable. Why not? They do it with all their other formats. It's "innovation" after all to put a can-opener and a compass on everything you copy from someone else.

Wrong.

[linuxmop]

"PNG restarts the compression on each row"

That is absolutely not true, and would be madness if it were. From the specification, section 4.5.5:

The sequence of filtered scanlines in the pass or passes of the PNG image is compressed (see figure 4.10) by one of the defined compression methods. The concatenated filtered scanlines form the input to the compression stage. The output from the compression stage is a single compressed datastream.

The rest of your post is suspect now, of course.

Re:Wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

madness?

THIS IS SPARTA!

This isn't about jpeg, this is about lock-in

[SmallFurryCreature]

It is simple, the new image format is NOT compatible with the gpl, meaning that once you have chosen that format you will be locked in to using software that supports it. Hmmm, now wich software would that be. Ooh, I know, MS wants you to be locked into OS-X!

Oh, you thinks it is windows. Well I suppose if you are paranoid you could think that MS is trying to introduce a new format that would lock people to its own products by capturing their content.

For this to work MS doesn't have to destroy jpeg at all, it doesn't even have to touch it. It just has to make it that enough people use the new format that it becomes an essential thing.

Just imagine what happens to the web if IE supports this and other browsers can't. Voila, only IE (on windows) can be used to see the whole web. Wanna bet that losts of myspace and other social sites visitors where people upload snaps made with their MS phones would be laden with this new image?

With every thing MS does you simply got to ask yourselve this, "how can this be used to futher tie the user into using MS software exclusively".

If you look at the number of posts here that are about the format rather then the license then even slashdotters are taken in by it.

Re:This isn't about jpeg, this is about lock-in

[^_^x]

As a resident Windows "apologist" (haha) I have to agree. This will probably end up like ASF/WMV or MS Office files - strict control of who's allowed to decode their proprietary format. Even if it starts open, they could just release a new version that's incompatible then change the rules.

It's a bit on the big side compared to JPEG, but I'm a fan of PNG. Used optimally, it's even pretty small too.

What I'd really like to see though is a mostly lossless format that's optimized for extremely high-res images on minimal hardware configurations, if nothing else, just to fill that gap. There are good phones/MP3 players that can show some pretty big JPEGs, but they still require a lot of processing power, and usually a fair bit of memory to open it up with any kind of speed... Then again, it may become a moot point as handheld devces get beefier.

And X11 goes up to 16 bits per channel

[jcupitt65]

X11 goes up to 16 bits per channel RGB, but no one really uses it. You're right, superbright displays that can actually show all those bits need to become cheap before this is more than a curiosity.

I remember seeing a 12 bits per channel CRT at SPIE in 1996. There was no obvious improvement, even on their demo images. It's just too hard to (1) get noise down enough that the bits become significant, and then (2) get the display bright enough that a human observer under reasonable conditions can see the extra detail.

internet collaboration project

[Mihai Cartoaje]

I have started an internet collaboration project to develop a next-generation image format for digital photography. It is here:
http://geocities.com/repstsb/libima.html

The codec is still in alpha stage. It has lots of features, such as lossless compression of images in the OpenEXR 32 bits per sample floating point format.

Re:Vista supports 128 bit internal rendering of gf

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac OS X already has support for floating-point 32-bit per component (= 128bit) images. That's the format CoreImage uses internally, and I think CoreGraphics supported it since 10.0. I don't know if the video cards and drivers they currently ship already let you output all that information on the screen, but OS X definitely had OS level support for 128-bit images before you even heard the Vista monicker.

The real question

[eagl]

The real question - does it have to be licensed?

If it does, then it's freaking worthless, no better than if I tried to tell everyone they could write text documents but had to pay me or I'd sue them. Because that's what happened with .gif and .mp3, and that's what makes those formats something to avoid at almost all costs because you can be sued if you use them without paying the man.

There are plenty of perfectly good formats that don't require payment to anyone. USE THEM INSTEAD.

Re:The real question

[AnalogDiehard]

Another good question is does it implement DRM?

If Vista's Hollywood-eccentric video DRM control is any indication, I seriously question any new standard that M$ proposes.

Like PNG killed off GIF?

[NekoXP]

Yeah right. End of JPEG. As if.

It may simply become the "other format" supported on every camera (alongside JPEG, RAW or even TIFF) the same way Ogg is the "other format" supported on MP3 players (also supporting WMA, AAC). I doubt they have wild new technology in there that will make it hard to support all of them at once.

Re:Vista supports 128 bit internal rendering of gf

[BigBuckHunter]

Vista has the headroom to really display images that contain more than 8bpc (RGB)

I was under the impression that Windows was "still" incapable of properly blitting an image to the screen. Which API are you using to render your images? GDI, GDI+, DirectDraw/blit, DirectDraw/overlay, Direct3D, OpenGL, and WPF/Avalon all have major rendering issues. What good is 30bit rendering when you can't put it to the screen at that quality.

Perhaps there is some new "working" API in vista that I am unaware of?

BBH

WMV / WMA all over again...

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll set their OS software to use it by default for any downloaded digital camera images, people will end up with hundreds of photos in the MS proprietary standard, other software will have to start supporting it, licensing it, etc.

Profit.

Well, that's the plan, anyway. I can't see any valid technical reason for reinventing the wheel again (JPEG2000, PNG, TIFF, etc.).

No jpeg 32bit? lazy mofos

[cheekyboy]

Is it so hard for some one to do a 'retrofitted' custom jpeg mod to do a 16bit/channel JPEG ?

Sure it would be non-standard, but if its 100% based on the old jpeg source, but only difference is its 16bpc then it might take off.

While we are at it, add support for multiple compression DCT tables for 8pixel row, so those blue skys can use lower comp levels.

Quick, someone hack jpeg official source to support 16/32bits and re-release it as jpeg16/jpeg32

Surely the DCT code can handle 16bit.

What is the jpeg consortium doing with the last 20years of patent profits?

Though I did find a 12bit extension at http://www.dclunie.com/16bit.html

New requirement for standards submissions

[Anonymous Coward]

No patents or transfer of patents to standards body.

Re:It's not the format, stupid. It's the license.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's absent from their open specification promise and why do we want a Microsoft controlled TIFF anyway? A decent lossy compression codec for OpenEXR maintained by reputable companies (ie: not Microsoft) would be a superior solution.

can't be trusted: we need an alternative

[oohshiny]

Microsoft claims that adjustments can be made to color balance and exposure settings that won't discard or truncate data that occurs with other bit-map formats.

It's trivial to do that: instead of changing the bits, you add a list of transformations to the image header. Trouble is: when such a format comes from Microsoft, they will have numerous patents on it and Microsoft will use those aggressively to maintain their monopoly. It doesn't matter that it's obvious how to do this. It doesn't matter that they weren't the first to invent it.

The world does need a better alternative to JPEG, but it must not come from Microsoft. The FOSS world should instead repeat what happened with PNG and Ogg: create an open, patent-unencumbered format.

MOD PARENT DOWN, BLATENTLY WRONG

[petermgreen]

PNG with bzip2 is not worth it. PNG restarts the compression on each row. Compressing with PNG is like chopping a 1000000 byte file into 1000 files of 1000 bytes each, and then compressing the pieces separately.
pure bullshit as another reply has stated

note that because deflate is a stream compressor though you can decompress as you download before receiving all the data.

At 1000 bytes per chunk, bzip2 and gzip compress about equally well. At even smaller sizes, gzip is often better.
this may or may not be true but your previous error makes it irrelevent.

bzip2 on the raw image data actually competes very well with PNG. Sometimes PNG is better, and sometimes "raw.bz2" is better.
but i bet a format based on png but using bzip2 in place of gzip would be better than either

it would be interesting to save a test image as a png, extract the IDAT chunk from the wrapper, decompress it and recompress it with bzip2

And yes, transforming the data before applying a compression algorithm is best of all. PNG actually does do that. A real simple transform (which PNG uses) that can help a lot is just feeding the difference between adjacent pixels to the compressor, rather than the pixel values themselves.
png offers four filter types (plus the option of no filter at all which is often used for indexed color images) three of which do perform vertical comparisons. Filter type can be selected on a per-line basis.

I suspect DNG will fail.

[Rocketship Underpant]

The problem with DNG, as I understand it, is that it's not really forward-compatible -- and it can't be. 'RAW' data is not a format, it's simply the raw data produced by various solid-state image sensors that are constantly increasing in complexity. DNG is designed to encode the various characteristics used by (most) current digital SLRs, but its designers were not able to foresee all the new ways of capturing and digitizing light -- mosaic patterns, colour spaces, etc. -- that future camera manufacturers will invent. I've heard there are already problems with cutting-edge CCDs whose data output can't be adequately represented in DNG.

This is possibly the reason why Aperture only supports DNG files for camera models whose RAW data it is designed to read. If software engineers haven't perfected the nuanced conversion of RAW data for a specific camera into image data, there's little point in making a half-assed attempt with an unknown flavour of DNG.

Not likely

[Greg.Rodden]

Look at OGG vs MP3. I know a lot of you actually use OGG across your entire playlist but the undeniable fact is that MP3 is still the king. It was just there first.

Re:Vista supports 128 bit internal rendering of gf

[dudeX]

Mac OS X can handle 128 bit graphics calculations the same way Windows XP can do 32 bit graphic processing for GDI+, or OpenGL can take advantage of higher bit representations. Howeever, when it comes time to talk to the video card, it gets truncated to 8bits per channel.

However, Mac OS X is the first to have 32 bit floating point representation for audio in CoreAudio, way before Windows Vista.

I'm hoping Leopard will match or exceed in Vista in this regard. But Apple doesn't have an "MSDN" like Microsoft, so I don't know.

MS Proposing an image format?

[codifus]

Where's Adobe? What do they have to say? They created Photoshop and the PDF format. If anyone should be making a new image format it should be them. Hell maybe even Apple should do it since they did Quicktime. What did MS do? PAINT? Sheesh

Re:Vista supports 128 bit internal rendering of gf

[dudeX]

The rendering issues are bugs from their implementation of their APIs, but that doesn't affect the capability for Vista to take advantage of high bit displays.

BTW, can you link me to these "blitter" issues, I am curious.

Quality, and opinion...

[Dragon_Hilord]

Quality of results and Opinion by the end-users (sheep or otherwise) will tell the future of this format. As general open-source users, we only fear the patents and other BS that The Man likes to use. Normal users don't even know what a software patent is usually. The winner will be quality and the experience people have using the files. Somebody mentioned that pictures downloaded from cameras will be converted to this by windows, I would like to point out most cameras internally use JPEG to compress the images and basically stick it on the card. I'm unsure, but that idea could apply to any kind of high-end camera that used something like "raw" or some other very basic lossless format. Cheers, DH.

Six is having problems...

[darthnoodles]

Six is having problems
Adjusting to his clone status

Clones (We're All) by ALICE COOPER

Fractals

[hack slash]

Whatever happened to fractal compression of images?

Re:Vista supports 128 bit internal rendering of gf

[BigBuckHunter]

BTW, can you link me to these "blitter" issues, I am curious.

The problems are numerous, and I haven't compiled a comprehensive list. A.Lee seems to have done a pretty good job with this one here... http://virtualdub.org/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=146# body . I could probably add a few specific bugs to this, but most of them would be nit-picky

BBH

Another link about this

[Hausenwulf]

Here's another story about it on CNet.

http://news.com.com/Photoshop+gets+HD+Photo+suppor t/2100-1046_3-6165425.html?tag=html.alert

Re:Vista supports 128 bit internal rendering of gf

[poot_rootbeer]

the old graphic file formats aren't going to look as good anymore.

Bullshit. The old file formats will still look as good as they ever have. It's just that they won't take advantage of the FULL potential of the newer, more capable hardware.

If you're satisfied with what you have now, why upgrade? This rule applies whether you're talking about PNG, DVD, or MP3.

Convincing but wrong, mod parent down

[An dochasac]

'RAW' isn't used by anybody. 'RAW' does not exist. 'RAW' is a collective name for a shitload of formats by a smaller shitload of digital camera companies.

No, it's not. RAW = Canon's "raw" image format. "Raw" image formats are produced by many higher-end digital cameras. I'm sorry you don't understand the distinction between RAW and raw, but it does make it painfully obvious this isn't your area of expertise. It is mine: I've shot RAW images on my Canon dSLR for fun and profit for several years now. I shoot exclusively in RAW format because of the extra bit depth which makes adjustments much more 'transparent' (a level adjustment won't cause as much problems wit 10-12 bit data as it will with 8 bit, and you also have no compression artifacts.) I archive everything in the original Canon RAW format.

Since you claim expertise in this area and make some arguments that are, on the surface, convincing I feel it is important to point out mistakes in your arguments. Mistakes that even a relatively raw beginner such as myself are aware of. It appears that you have a very high level understanding of RAW, but to extend this into an understanding of the internals is a dangerous thing to do on Slashdot. First of all, since you speak of Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Pentax 'raw', I think you do understand that each of these formats are unique. The original poster is correct that some manufacturers (e.g. Sony) actually encrypt some of the data in their RAW format so that (for instance) the white balance can only be extracted using proprietary software. It may not be "a Sh!7l0ad of smaller manufacturers" from your point of view, but since I've seen relatively inexpensive Sony, Canon, Pentax and (the dearly departed) Minolta cameras spit out what their marketing material claims is "raw". The bottom line is that RAW is like tiff, only worse in that the data, data representation (byte order...), encoder and container may change from manufacturer to manufacturer. The only thing Canon RAW and Sony RAW are certain to have in common is that their marketing material, instruction book and camera's menu uses the three letters 'R', 'A', and 'W' to represent the name of the format (or in some cases 'r', 'a', 'w'. For a close look at the internals of many raw formats, I suggest you look at the source code to Dcraw. A few other mistakes, even really cheap webcams don't encode to gif (I don't know where that comment came from but they don't, the closed driver software takes the "raw" CMOS/CCD data and encodes it to GIF without letting the user see the raw data. If you're into astrophotography or have used a webcam on an opensource operating system, you'll understand more. Also, the raw file may be the closest consumers can come to the CCD's internal format, but by no means does is it identical to the RAW CCD data as it comes out of the CCD's analog light buckets (or CMOS gates) into the A/D.

Calling the kettle black

[hzamir]

I remember the last time when Microsoft doomed what would otherwise have been a good format (FlashPix). Their "contributions" made it unusable in two ways. First, their "structured storage" which made it unbearable complex. Second, their insistence on a *destructive* alpha channel, in which the RGB values were premultiplied by the alpha channel as an optimization, making it impossible to recover colors from the areas designated as transparent.

And *now* they are championing "non-destructive" edits?

RE: file extentions

[chrwei]

We really do need to agree on a standard codec as well as container format so that anything that claims to read .foo files can indeed read all your .foo files.

The way i read this, you're problem isn't the codec it's the file extension and on that front you have quite an uphill battle. I once suggested different extensions for different codecs and, well, you can read the reply.

I agree with the basic principles of having a standard codec: people don't care about extensions or codecs, they just want to see the media. However, how do we choose one? We don't have a standard document format, or a standard HTML or javascript, or a standard tire and wheel, or even a standard gas filler cap! How can we possibly have a standard codec when we can't even have a standard memory card format?

The only way to have a standard is to involve government to impose a standard. This is how we got the telephone standard, and like it or not, ethernet, tcp/ip, and many things ISO or IEEE were all developed using government money and guidance. It's very rare that industry will define a standard and almost always only happens when interoperability and manufacturing costs are key to any single company succeeding, such as PCIe and USB. A media codec is easy to install therefor "manufacturing costs" are simply not there to motivate. A standard codec will simply never happen in a free (as in speech, not beer) world.

Big question: Who will use it?

[Ullteppe]

Photo HD is completely irrelevant. Who is going to implement it?

I don't see why Adobe should be motivated to do so.

There is no reason for the camera manufacturers to do so.

Apple obviously won't.

OSS software won't.

So what's left? MS's own software? There's TONS of people using MS photo software, right? Ha-ha!

This is like trying to displace PDF by including support for MS's own format in Notepad.

TIFF

[HomelessInLaJolla]

Isn't tiff the most freely available raw picture format?

TIFF like container

[HomelessInLaJolla]

Everything else is a product of the software suite to support the format.

Actual numbers from the web

[Reziac]

[goes off to googlefight, inputs .PNG vs .GIF, then .PNG vs .JPG] .PNG: 71,400,000 results .GIF: 276,000,000 results .JPG: 440,000,000 results

Draw your own conclusions.

Highlights

[HomelessInLaJolla]

How much of that can be done with netpbm libraries and an open image format? Why reinvent the wheel for any purpose other than attempting to corner the market?

IANAAR - what about custom web apps etc.. ?

[freaker_TuC]

IANAAR (IANAAGR) I Am Not Always A (good) Reader (opposite of RTFM I guess ;) you've read it here first, credits go to me)

This post towards web developing; what about custom thumbnail sizes? I'd like my customers to have their own way of setting their thumbnail; and preferably in a few ways even for a low-bandwidth and high-bandwidth mode (which I got implemented in some of my applications).

What about such?

• Which are the limits of this TIFF-like container?
• Is there any ability to put more thumbnails in it?
• TIFF is a bloody hell to work with through the web (I use ImageMagick to convert it and use a cached JPG file); do I need to do this too with this format ?
• What about the license ? Can Microsoft just close the entire thing on succes?
• What's the definition of free at Microsoft? does it include the compression routines? The specs?

Sorry to say, I am very sceptical towards this format which is again one of the many with a few nice additions.
It might be an easier format operable for graphics designers and such but still, is it layer/raster based?
How easy will it be to plugin in already existing software which is not necessary ran by a Microsoft os?
Is it really that better because those two additions?
Are there any other graphic container formats similar like this? Is this one of the many created for promotion ?

Those are a lot of questions, maybe to roundup all the question the biggest of 'm all,

Does this new spec offer anything more than a Microsoft owned variant, one of the many, with a few nice features added?